Gametrodon

Category: Video Games

  • Cult of the Lamb

    Cult of the Lamb isn’t a bad game, but it doesn’t commit to any of its single mechanics adequately to be an excellent game. The only area where it makes any real innovation is in combining the various gameplay loops that it consists of. But perhaps as a result of that synthesis, none of those loops felt very deep. As such, I didn’t personally enjoy it, and I don’t recommend it.

    Let’s back up for a moment, so I can catch my breath from outrunning the screaming mobs. The game is getting a lot of good press and attention right now, and I suspect my opinion is going to be somewhat unpopular. Still, before you crucify me, let me explain myself.

    Cult of the Lamb presents itself as a combination of a management sim and action roguelike. You play as the Lamb, resurrected from a sacrificial death by an elder god-like figure, The One Who Waits. Upon being returned to life, you are entrusted with two goals. To build a cult in his name, and to slay the four bishops who trapped him.

    I’ll cover the slaying first. The action roguelike portion of the game follows the somewhat standard roguelite formula. Upon beginning a run (or crusade, as the game likes to call them), you’re dropped into a level and given a starting weapon and a curse. There are four or so base weapon types, each with varying speed and attacks.

    The dagger is the fastest, but with low damage, while the hammer is the slowest, actually having a sort of windup before it swings. The sword and the axe sit in the middle. There are more variants applied to each of the base weapon types, but they don’t really change how the weapons play, just how much damage they do. Curses are just spells. You spend fervor to use them and they have some sort of damaging effect. You get fervor by killing and hitting enemies.

    The system is pretty light on builds, so runs don’t feel that different. You can’t force weapon spawns to show up, and despite the variants, each variant feels the same as the base. For example, the poison dagger and the godly dagger don’t feel different to use, even if the second has much more damage.

    Anyway, back to crusade mechanics. The goal of a run is to reach the end of the zone, which looks something like the map below. Along the way you’ll gather various resources and crafting ingredients.

    While this might look a little intimidating at first, there are usually only 2-3 combat areas in a run. The rest are actually resource nodes, shops, or other small events.

    Upon reaching the final area of a zone, one of two things will happen. One, you’ll face off against a mini-boss for a bit more loot and a recruitable. Or two, if you’ve already defeated the zone 3 times, you’ll face off against the zone’s boss: one of the four Bishops of the Old Faith.

    I played the game on medium difficultly, and I’d say that none of the fights are particularly challenging. Only one boss fight in the game took me multiple attempts.

    If you win the fight, you’ll get some bonus resources, and if you lose, you’ll lose some of what you’ve collected. Either way you’ll be sent back to your cult after. This is the management sim portion of the game. You can construct buildings with resources you’ve gathered. But you make the the most important building during the game’s intro: the shrine. The shrine is used to gather devotion.

    Devotion serves the role that something like “Science points” would in another game. It’s used to unlock additional buildings and structures from your primary tech tree. The other resources you have to keep an eye on are the food and faith meters. While individual cultists have their own stats, these meters provide a sort of aggregate overview of the status of your cult. Keep your cultists fed, or they’ll start to starve, and get unhappy. Keep them loyal, or they’ll… I actually don’t know what happens to be honest. I never had any loyalty problems.

    This might have been because the only time someone wasn’t loyal, I sacrificed them to be ritually devoured by tentacles.

    Speaking of, rituals! Another building you unlock early on is the Church, where you can perform rituals and announce doctrines for your followers to obey. In theory, it’s kind of a neat idea. In practice, I never once ran out of the resource needed to perform rituals, so I pretty much just performed them whenever they were off cooldown. For some rituals the cooldown was several in-game days long.

    The timing system itself is probably worth noting. Time passes the same regardless of if you’re at your cult, or on a crusade. And cultists can’t make their own food. So it’s somewhat necessary to either set things up so that they won’t starve while you’re away, or to try to minimize the time spent on your crusades.

    This is as good a moment as any to talk about the cultists themselves.

    While each individual cultist does have some of their own traits, they don’t offer much variety. I only ever saw cultists with a maximum of three traits, and most of them have fairly minimal gameplay impacts; things like “15% faster/slower gathering speed.”

    The end result is that I never really felt incentivized to get attached to anyone, or to assign any specific cultist a specific task. The benefits to doing so were pretty much non-existent.

    It doesn’t help that there are a bunch of other mechanics that discourage you from getting attached. Cultists can die of old age, which encourages constantly acquiring new members. But cultist death makes it feel bad to use gifts or invest any significant effort into leveling up a single member. There’s also a portion of the game where several of your cultists will be randomly selected to turn against you, and you’re forced to kill them. You can also unlock the ability to sacrifice members for various reasons, including to resurrect yourself after dying in the roguelike portion of the game, but I never used that feature.

    This is the biggest argument for me on why Cult of the Lamb isn’t like Animal Crossing. Cultists aren’t friends or helpful NPC’s. They’re a resource to be used in your quest to slay the bishops. At their best, they’re pretty much slaves to your every whim. At their worst, you can sacrifice them to a pit of tentacles for emergency meat.

    Since I’ve covered most of the game’s mechanics, let me try to wrap it all up into one neat package. The action roguelite section of the game doesn’t have the build diversity of other games like Binding of Issac or Atomicrops, or the mechanical challenge. At the same time, the cult management portion of the game doesn’t offer the mechanical depth of other sim games, like Cultivation Simulator or Dwarf Fortress.

    At the same time it doesn’t have the comfy factor of something like Animal Crossing, since many of the mechanics apply pressure to your cult. It feels like a waste to construct various decorations and buildings when the same resource could be used to create another outhouse.

    I’ve talked a lot shit, so before I wrap this up, I want to say some nice things. Cult of the Lamb has absolutely incredible art style, that it executes to near perfection. And while the plot twist is pretty easy to see coming, there were a few moments in the game that did creep me out. It’s not enough to change my opinion on the game. In 12 hours of gameplay, I can’t tell you the name of a single cultist or about a really cool run, but I do remember a small set of dialogue from an NPC that twisted the knife on how fucked up the game’s universe is.

    So, yeah. I don’t personally recommend Cult of the Lamb. This isn’t because it’s a bad game. But what I personally tend to prize in games is either new weird mechanics/risks, or really fun moment to moment gameplay and systems. Cult of the Lamb doesn’t do either of those things. Instead, it’s a synthesis of existing mechanics, and watered down versions of their systems.

    Cult of the Lamb is $25 for all platforms.

  • You shouldn’t play The Cycle: Frontier

    This is less a review and more of a public service announcement. I was recommended The Cycle: Frontier several months back. Maybe not so much recommended as someone told me they were playing it. I asked them if it was good, and I got told “It’s like Escape From Tarkov,” which didn’t answer my question. In retrospect, that might have been a warning sign.

    But it was free. How much did I have to lose?

    The answer is “5+ hours of my life.”

    Why do I hate this game? Well, a lot of reasons actually! Funnily enough, they’re not the same reasons most negative reviews on the Steam page offer. Those reviews have issues with the massive numbers of hackers, and the claim that the game’s secondary map is imbalanced. The hacker complaint actually somewhat surprised me, as Cycle Frontier has very invasive anti-cheat.

    Anyway, I have my own reasons for hating this game. In order to explain them, I need to explain Cycle Frontier’s gameplay loop.

    In Cycle Frontier, you are a “Prospector” who gets airdropped from outer space onto some planet. Your goal is to collect as much garbage loot as possible, get to an extraction point, call down a shuttle, board the shuttle, and survive until it takes off.

    Of course, the other players are also trying to do the same thing. One of the big differentiators between this game and something like Hunt: Showdown is that all players aren’t spawned in at the same time. More players can drop in whenever. And as you might guess, it’s a lot less work to just kill other folks and take their stuff, than to try to find loot yourself.

    Let’s start with my first problem with the game: the loot. Loot in Cycle Frontier is visually difficult to actually spot, so much so that every lootable item has a glowing sheen effect that plays on it. I’m assuming they did that so I’d be able to tell that this random alien shrubbery is loot, and this one is scenery. In addition, there’s no “Take All” option, so each time you open a crate, get clicking.

    Loot is also incredibly uninspiring. It’s all random trash and garbage that gets used as part of inane upgrade trees to… give you more stuff with your daily login rewards. Oh, I’m sorry, they’re called “Crates” and they’re on a timer, but they’re pretty much just daily login rewards. And perhaps most importantly, you know what you won’t find as loot ever? ACTUAL WEAPONS.

    And this is a problem, because you can’t get weapons except by buying them. So forget about just dropping in naked, scavenging what you can find, and making do, because you won’t find anything. Backpacks and weapons almost entirely seem to only drop from other players. In my time playing, I’ve never seen a single one that didn’t appear to come off a corpse.

    Of course, this all starts to make sense when you realize you can “insure” your gear to get it, or its equivalent value back in credits. Just spend a bit of your Premium Currency! Because of course this game has premium currency. And while there is a way to earn some of it in game, again, it’s tied to the daily crate system.

    Now all of this might be tolerable if the game’s gunplay mechanics were incredible, and genre defining, but they’re trash. On multiple levels. Let’s start with the game’s AI enemies.

    There are enemies in games that are “Bullet Sponges.” I wouldn’t describe enemies in Cycle: Frontier like that. The enemies in Cycle are the fucking Bounty Wipes best value, soaks up more than the competition of damage absorption. This is to presumably make up for the fact they’re braindead, with all the tactical sense of a rock. I’ve had more exciting tactical engagements trying to get a cat into its carrier so I can take it to the vet.

    But again, this is more “large annoyance” than fundamental problem. Bad loot, obnoxious progression, perverse incentives for combat engagement, and bullet sponge enemies are all individually frustrating, but on their own, are not the death toll for a PVP shooter.

    However, bad sound design is. And Cycle Frontier has the worst sound design I’ve encountered. I’m not a big audio person, so I can’t give a good technical explanation of why it sucks, but I can give a few notable examples.

    Whenever a player is dropped into your map, they’re sent down in a drop pod, and it makes a large sonic boom sort of noise. This would useful, except that it’s pretty much omni-directional, and gives no info about where it came from. In one game, I heard something like 13 of these in a row, and I have no idea if it was 13 players or a sound bug.

    In another game, I was crouching around when another player used the audio wheel to talk to me. Based on the sound playing, I assumed the player was located above me, and hid in a bush. However, after waiting a decent while, I saw them emerge, look around, and then scuttle off. Where had they been located? Maybe 30 meters behind me in the same small strip of river.

    Another really obnoxious one is how the movement audio plays. If you move, the audio plays the full stepping clip, except that the clip is LONGER than taking a single step forward. So if you move and stop, there will still be sound. This all gives the impression that there’s someone around you, even when you’re completely alone.

    The sound design is the nail in the coffin of Cycle: Frontier. It takes something mediocre, and transforms it into something effectively unplayable. There are other annoyances and frustrations, but it could be argued they are part of the game’s design. But a game where you can’t hear your enemy coming has no business being a hardcore PVP FPS.

    Editors Note: The Cycle Frontier is actually being shut down shortly as of June 2023. I’m honestly a bit shocked by this. The player numbers don’t seem to be that bad.

  • Garfield Kart – Furious Racing

    The bar for franchised game tie-ins is a moving target, but it’s rarely above sea level. Often, it spends time in the Mariana Trench. I’m lucky in that the franchises I love started as games, so the games are usually pretty good (or in the case of Pokémon, “Yes, it’s the same thing, but I bought it and it was okay the last 5 times so I guess I’ll do it again.”)

    There are exceptions, of course, coughMagic:Legendscough but on the whole, I don’t actually play many games based on “Things I liked when they weren’t games.” I’m much more likely to buy a shirt because you wrote Undertale on it in comic sans, than I am to buy a game because it has LeBron James, or Rick and Morty in it.

    All of this is a lead up to say that my expectations for Garfield Kart – Furious Racing were low. Very low. And while the game does exceed my expectations, the fact that it doesn’t crash constantly and runs on my Ultrawide monitor at all is already miles above what I expecting. My expectations were right next to the funny looking fish with the glowing bulb attached to its head.

    Garfield Kart – Furious Racing is a a cart racer based off the Garfield comic strip: the fat orange cat who hates Mondays, loves lasagna, and made its creator Jim Davis a fortune. As a child, I actually liked Garfield if only because a cartoon where the cat actually wins made me happy. A a teenager I thought it was incredibly stupid, and not actually funny. But a stronger understanding of how syndication works, and how easy it is for a comic strip to get kicked from a paper at least makes me respect the effort it must take to tell 20+ years of mildly inoffensive “jokes” and not upset anyone.

    Anyway, the theming is skin deep. Garfield Kart is fairly straightforward cart racer. If you’ve ever played any Mario Kart, you’ll pick it up quickly. If you haven’t played any Mario Kart, well, it’s a cart racer, so you’ll pick it up in like 5 minutes tops anyway.

    Mechanically, Garfield Kart isn’t hugely technical. Press a button to go forward, toggle your drifts on curves to get a mini-turbo, and hit item boxes for consumables. The consumables range from a lasagna (a single use speed boost), to two variety of pies you can throw at your enemy (one type homes, the other type you have to aim). And it wouldn’t be Mario Kart without an item to royally screw the first place player. In Garfield Kart, that’s the UFO: a trio of three alien spaceships that fly ahead on the course, lay down tractor beams, and grab the first person to pass through.

    Strangely enough, the UFO is fairly good for illustrating perhaps my biggest gameplay gripe with the game. Once a player ends up in first place, it’s incredibly difficult to catch them. A lot of the speed loss in Garfield Kart comes from crashing into other carts, and once you get ahead, it’s incredibly easy to just chain mini-turbos. And because of how item rolls work, it’s unlikely that the second place player will get the red shells homing pies they need to close the gap.

    Outside of that, we have the actual racing tracks. Garfield Kart has 16 tracks, all of which are fine. There’s a fair amount of asset reuse between them, but that’s not really a big deal to me.

    What is a slightly bigger deal to me are the bugs. Garfield Kart is mostly stable, but has a fair number of bugs. In the 10 hours I’ve played, here’s a sampling of what I’ve seen: 1. Item display from item boxes not updating, and showing you as having an item after you’ve used it. 2. Cart collisions acting inconsistently. 3. Netcode resulting in other carts clipping into you, and launching you through the ground. 4. Hitting geometry at weird angles can easily result in carts getting stuck tilted up at 90 degrees, and unable to move. 5. AI getting permanently lodged on rocks.

    Garfield Kart isn’t a bad game. It’s effectively just a low budget Mario Kart clone with a more boring theme, fewer tracks, and less polish. And while I would normally say “Just go play Mario Kart,” what sets Garfield Kart apart is its price point and system.

    See, Garfield Kart regularly goes on sale for about a $1.50, a price at which you can buy 10 copies, send them to all your friends, and have an amusing cart racer to play with everyone for under $20. Compare to Mario Kart 8, which is $60 for the game alone, and another $50+ for each controller, and all of a sudden Garfield Kart is an absolute bargain.

    So yes, while I do recommend Garfield Kart, it’s a conditional recommendation based on having 3-4 other folks to play it with, and spending about as much as a Snickers bar per person on the game itself.

  • An Interview with Jongwoo Kim, Creative Director of Lucifer Within Us – Part 4

    This is final part of a series from an interview with Jongwoo Kim, the creative director of Lucifer Within Us, a unique mystery game. To read our writeup on the game, click here. To read part three, click here.

    Headcanon, Scalpels, and Lessons Learned

    Fritz Wallace: One of the things I mentioned in the writeup was that Lucifer Within Us does feel a bit short. Like, I solved the last case, and the big reveal happens, and I’m ready for the next part… and then credits roll. Was the game intended to be a setup for the next part of the adventure after those first three cases?

    Jongwoo Kim: In my headcanon, Ada goes off and it’s a longer adventure in that world to find those acolytes, and exorcise each one. It would be much more episodic. LWU as it is almost functions as an origin story for this world, and Ada, to set up the other “Books” in the series, if we were using Sherlock Holmes as an example. I would love for her to go on more adventures.

    Fritz Wallace: Another lore question, if you don’t mind. Is Ada’s ability to use the timeline a supernatural, or a technical ability? Or is it something else?

    Jongwoo Kim: I think that’s an excellent question. She’s an exorcist, but what makes her special? When we initially envisioned the project, when the timeline was created, it was meant to be a mind’s-eye sort of thing. It’s someone replaying in their mind. But that was when it was one of multiple tools the player had access to.

    Given how dominant it became, I don’t we ever really decided “how” it worked. I think if it was an actual supernatural ability, we would have had some visual of her engaging in the timeline mode, but we didn’t do that. So I think the reality of the game that we actually delivered is that Ada is just visualizing it in her head. It’s not magic, a special technology, or supernatural ability, it’s a skill she has. At the same time, given the setting, I can see why folks might view it as one of the first three.

    Let me put it this way. Something I really wanted to avoid doing was… I feel very frustrated with Quantic Dream-style mystery adventure stuff. Occasionally the player gets amazing abilities. In Heavy Rain, the Agent gets Ari, where he can go into his own world, and solve stuff. But you can only do that when the player is allowed to. The game decides when you can do that.

    It raises the question “Without this ability, is the Agent a worse detective?”
    I didn’t want to diminish Ada, and by extension the player, by implying that this is just a trick, or magic. I wanted the player feel like they solved the case through their sheer intellect.

    The only concession and supernatural ability is the ability to exorcise demons, and to enter the sanctums of the suspect. So, in that way, she doesn’t have any other supernatural crime solving abilities, because that would be truer to her character, and the spirit of the game.

    Fritz Wallace: I feel like the game did that really well. Throughout the whole game, there was only one moment of adventure game logic: that bit in the second case where you have to pick up the scalpel, and then give it to the doctor to have them perform an autopsy.

    Jongwoo Kim: God, that scalpel. Yeah, that case has a long history, and lot of iterations. I’m not super happy with how the scalpel stuff was implemented in the end. So I sympathize with you there.

    I do want to comment on that a little bit. One of our challenges was figuring out if problems in the game were due to UI, or to mechanics. One of the things we ended up doing over time was simplifying down interactions you can take with a character. So instead of asking or presenting, it would be just one action.

    Generally we wanted to avoid what you called “Adventure Game Logic”. Shouldn’t Ada be able to perform the autopsy herself? In terms of the scalpel, in terms of trying to ship with the assets we had, we ended up going that direction [having the doctor perform the autopsy]. If I could, I’d have Ada examine or autopsy the body herself.

    Fritz Wallace: You’ve mentioned a few games whose mechanics you don’t feel do mystery very well. Were there any other games or stories that did influence Lucifer Within Us? I feel like the default suggestion is something like Sherlock Holmes.

    Jongwoo Kim: So, as far as Holmes influence, I don’t think any specific case or book influenced the game. But it was important to me, as far as player experience or the dream of the game. The phrase I kept repeating during development as “The player should not feel like Watson, the player should feel like Holmes.”

    I often feel that in a lot of mystery games, the rug is pulled from underneath you. As much as I like Dapangropa, I get frustrated with every debate, because it’s like “Oh my god, you’ve been withholding a critical piece of information the whole time. I could not have known the solution, or I could guess, but given the evidence in my log, I could never have solved this case the way you wanted me to with the given mechanics.”

    In that way, Holmes is a big inspiration. While I complain about the Frogwares Holmes games, in some ways, Holmes had a very kinetic style of investigation. He got into scuffles, he was at the scene of the crime. Ada is distinct from that. It’s a very clean investigation, followed by exorcism. But within the space of the investigation, there’s no field work other than the scene of the actual crime.

    So, for character and experience, Holmes was a big influence. Beyond that, Phoenix Wright for the contradiction system.

    Fritz Wallace: It’s interesting, since it’s such a clean investigation, relative to a lot of other things.

    Jongwoo Kim: It is a little ironic that to do that idea, we had to change the idea to be about the supernatural. I’m super happy with it too! But a part of me does wonder if it would have made a stronger mystery game [if it had maintained it’s Cyberpunk theme] even if the project is more interesting and compelling as a result of its unique setting. But I don’t know. I would love to try to make something with the timeline mechanic again to be sure.

    Fritz Wallace: One thing that did happen to me was that the game gives you 3 demons, and by the third case, there’s only one demon you haven’t exorcised yet. So it feels like it gives the game away a bit.

    Jongwoo Kim: I mean. I see it both ways.

    On one hand, I think it’s inevitable that if a game has an overarching arc, the player gets some sense of it. I think rewarding them on that front is good. So at some level, I’m happy if an astute player can see what happens in the third case ahead of time.

    At the same time, I was surprised by how many people were caught off guard by the victim of the third case, because they thought the abbot was set up to be the big bad, or what not.

    If I learned nothing else, I learned that it’s quite hard to predict how someone else will perceive the intended arc of a mystery. And I think that makes it interesting from a mystery design standpoint. It indicates there’s more to explore, and different levels of challenge one can design, without overwhelming the player.

    Fritz Wallace: I will say, I didn’t get the overarching structure of the game, with the spear and whatnot, until the second time I played it, and went “Oh, that’s how it all comes together.”

    Jongwoo Kim: Awesome. Well, I’m glad that worked for you on the second playthrough for sure.

    Fritz Wallace: I think that’s pretty much everything I had to ask. This is the part where if you want to give a shout out, or mention a current project, this would be the ideal place to do that.

    Jongwoo Kim: Well, I definitely have something cooking right now, but it’s not ready to show yet. I’m excited to unveil it to the world, and it’s coming soon.

    Fritz Wallace: Well, I’m looking forward to it. Thanks for taking the time to talk with me!

    Lucifer Within Us is available for PC on Steam. If this interview has made you interested, you can find it here!

  • An Interview with Jongwoo Kim, Creative Director of Lucifer Within Us – Part 3

    This interview is part three of a series from an interview with Jongwoo Kim, the creative director of Lucifer Within Us, a unique mystery game. To read our writeup on the game, click here. To read part two, click here.

    Technical Troubles of Transforming Time

    Fritz Wallace: Lucifer Within Us has an incredibly unique timeline mechanic that allows you replay and see what each suspect claims to have been doing at any given point in time, and to rewind and move around. How does that system work?

    Jongwoo Kim: I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but most games with a replay system won’t let you rewind. For example, if you watch a replay of a game like StarCraft, or an RTS, it’s usually not actually a replay, it’s just a recording of all the button presses.

    But for Lucifer Within Us, because the player needs to be able to smoothly rewind, we had to record the animation data for anyone point in time, in addition to recording all the animations and false testimony for any given point in time. And in addition to that recording, we had to make sure all of this was consistent with the audio for any given point in time.

    For example, if Gideon says one thing, but is located somewhere else, it won’t be a smooth experience. So you have to be sure when things are going to play, aligning your time cube.

    It’s actually a weird technical challenge that isn’t done often. It’s the kind of thing I’m quite proud of, like a very cool toy sort of thing. It’s quite satisfying for me to be able to rewind things back and forth, and see the characters move around.

    Fritz Wallace: I’m curious about this, since I’ve done a small amount of work with Unity myself. What made it so difficult?

    Jongwoo Kim: So certain parts are Unity specific, but the bigger problems are “How do you make a system where the player can rewind to any point, at any time, and still have it make sense?” And there are quite a few problems.

    The first one is logistics. How do you ensure a character’s movements are believable and make sense if the player can watch every moment of what they’re doing? Especially if what they’re doing a lie. The simple solution is to have them idle for a large amount of time once they reach what they’re doing.

    Before we implemented rapid scrolling/skipping, it was frustrating for the player experience to watch everything happen slowly, when you have idling like that. But if we’re assuming that the player should be able to navigate at any point in time (which is what you’d want to be able to do as an investigator), there are other weird challenges.

    For example, characters say their lines, but that won’t necessarily line up with the length of a given section of movement. Initially we had extensive testimony lines, but we realized players don’t want read paragraphs of text. Also, any text that’s not explicitly describing the actions being taken tended to be misleading, and players wanted to ask questions. There needed to be coherence between what was spoken, what was happening, and what was seen.

    But all of this still has to align with the logistics of the case, how the character gets there, and be continuous, because it’s a timeline. So the solution we came up with was that we had an editor built on top of Unity, that would allow us to record the case from beginning to end for every possible variant. And there are additive variants, it’s not like it’s just every single variation. So you’d have the vague testimony for every character, the true timeline for every character, and then every layer in between.

    Fritz Wallace: So for example, in the third case, where each of three suspects has to still line up and make sense at any point in their stories.

    Jongwoo Kim: So yeah, those three paths have to happen, but you have to keep in mind, sometimes the timing of objects involved in the case changes too. For example, in Gideon’s case, when and how he manipulates the coronet changes the testimony and outcome. The same is true of Abraham and the shovel. So you have to make sure certain objects disappear from the timeline, and only appear when they’re speaking.

    The coronets explosion example, she (Alex Bull, 3D Artist) had to make an animation, and then adapt the animation so it’s rewindable, but with the pieces still appearing and being discoverable on the ground.

    If you go back and look at everything side by side and where things are, you actually might notice a few small changes. There are some errors, and we tried to be very careful about avoiding them, but it was very tricky. We also discovered during testing that certain players are much more obsessive about certain errors then others. In the first case, the glass door and its position at the start of the case would frustrate players, because the door ends the testimony closed, but if it was open when the player gets there, it raises questions about who opened it, because someone must have.

    And so any error like that in the recordings became frustrating to players because it both throws the player off, and breaks that sense of being a detective. The vision of the game was for the player to use everything they see, and figure out the answer themselves. It was damaging and misleading when we made mistakes like that.

    From a very tech point, and this is Unity specific. There’s no built-in system in Unity that supports rewinding animations for the duration of the cases we have. While Unity does have a system that can work for 2 minutes in length, there was no guarantee that our cases would be under 2 minutes. It also has further restrictions: i.e., can only record during run-time. So a player would have to watch full case normal speed 1 before that system was usable.

    So we had to figure out another way. I won’t go too much into details, since I’m not sure that’s interesting to anyone who isn’t trying to perfectly recreate the system in Unity. There was an alternative animation system available in the Unity made by the developers that allows you to play any animation arbitrarily. And so by using that system, and then another way to capture either every frame, or however many intervals you wanted, to take a snapshot of a character, their exact animation state, what they were holding. And we’d take snapshot after snapshot, and then using those snapshots, we didn’t have to use Unity’s animation system any more. And using those snapshots, we could interpolate between the states.

    It’s a bit strange to say snapshots though, because that makes it seem like it’s an actual film in a way, right? But in reality, it’s still taking place in the physicals space of the game, the characters still are moving around, and have physical properties.

    In the ideal world, I would have wanted it so you could just reverse time whenever you wanted. If someone threw an object, you would just have the physics system run in reverse, accelerate it in the other direction. But because the player could skip around to any moment in time, and physics going backward is not something Unity supports, the approach we took was different, by recording at every major interval and interpolating, and taking enough snapshots that it looks smooth.

    Fritz Wallace: That’s a pretty intense technical challenge.

    Jongwoo Kim: Yeah, I don’t think the studio ever talked much about the technology we built for this project, but it is certainly something weird and unique about the game.

    Fritz Wallace: So it seems like a lot of effort was put into both designing these systems and making them work technically, which is fairly impressive.

    Jongwoo Kim: Yup.

    Fritz Wallace: Would you ever want to make more games using the timeline mechanics? Or more games in that setting?

    Jongwoo Kim: Yeah, so if I were given the opportunity to revisit that world, I’d really love to. Would I like to revisit those mechanics, whether it was using that IP or not? My answer would be a careful “Yes”.

    While we didn’t milk everything we could out of it, in terms of logistics and mechanics, it’s a very particular setup. In the sense of, not just the implications of the mechanics, as much as the logistics of making a game like that work. In order for that to happen, since I no longer have access to the code base, I’d have to rebuild a lot of things. And that’s the main thing I’d be reluctant to do.

    If I could, I’d love to make more cases. I think a timeline based approach has a lot more space to be explored. I also think some of the choices we made for Lucifer Within Us do restrict some future possibilities because of the narrative commitments of that project. I’m very happy with those narrative commitments, but at the same time a digital exorcist needs to exorcise demons. So we have to provide demons, and that narrows the possibilities compared to a traditional investigator. I don’t think that pertains to the timeline though.

    This concludes part 3 of the interview. The final part can be read here, and involves the games lore, headcannon, and some of the lessons learned from the project.