Like twelve years ago I was working on a first-person adventure game of some sort, initially on UE3 and then 4, where you’d drive a car. I had an admittedly vaguer-than-it-should-have-been pitch that I tried to get funding with, and that failed, so I canned it, but it resulted in a trailer (below) that I still think is cool, which is more than you usually get out of these things.
It was point-and-click vibes but first-person and walky-aroundy, and concerned with having a million tiny interactions, especially with the car, which was your inventory and how you’d move between scenes. You’d have conversations with dialogue choices in a non-modal way where you could walk around during the dialogue and ask about objects in the room, and if you walked too far away the conversation would end via “you walked too far away” dialogue, and you could pick it back up when you came back, etc – exactly what Cyberpunk 2077 would later do. Nothing special technically, but a novel approach I was excited about at the time.
The car inventory thing was just that you’d open the boot and put stuff in there if you didn’t want to lose it. Any item, any physics object that could fit. The whole inside of the car was interactive – headlights, glove box, windscreen wipers, you could roll the windows up and down, fiddle with the radio, and it was actually driveable as well – I planned on having some system or other to stop you from just driving into walls and shit while keeping you in control. Something like what the new 007 game does, I suppose. The plan was to have a notepad and a map on the passenger seat, which was heavily inspired by Interstate ’76 and also the annotatable map in Thief 2.
The story went through a few phases but was never fleshed out enough that I really regret it not being funded. I remember that we had an elderly protag with the beginnings of dementia (a couple of us had grandparents in that way at the time), on a road trip to attend a funeral. The travel system I had set up involved manually hitting the road, physically driving to a highway or something, and then smash-cutting, Blendo style, to the destination (or somewhere unexpected), sometimes with the suggestion that the cut was the protag losing time. You’d arrive at the place you’d wanted to go, but with some extra stuff in the boot from a location you must have stopped at along the way, or whatever, and sometimes that would be a lead for you to follow up on. Filling up your inventory with junk, like in all adventure games, but then not being able to answer somebody when they ask what you could possibly want with it – that sort of thing.
Visually I wanted it to look like the cutscenes from Interstate ’76, and I was having a good time making that sort of art (mostly photos scaled way down and sharpened and unfiltered), but UE3’s BSP was a bit of a hassle to work with compared to something like Scythe today. I’m ludicrously better-equipped to make this game today, but I don’t really want to. Soz 4 tk, Magenta fans.
Actually, that reminds me – before I had the forum I have now (post on my forum if you want), I briefly had one at around this time, and I wish I had a backup of it just because someone once went on there and pretended they’d played the game and wrote quite a long and interesting review of what they imagined it would have been. Their version had a moose. Can’t argue with that.
Leave a Reply