Xenocidaire Update (Patreon)

Real life intrudes but work continues.

A mock up of Senior Pilot Blowie dropping the titular Xenocidaire above a hot LZ

My horror vacui when it comes to setting, random details, and worldbuilding is another intruder, but I like to think that this deadline, which I am determined to keep, will teach me some discipline and economy. 

Here's a few sneak previews of Xenocidaire. I'm behind my own (probably too ambitious) schedule, but confident a nice little experience will be available on Monday. 

Splitter in a light biomechanical hardsuit. Born and raised on Giraffe-8, trained to fight and die in a shiny living suit of insectoid flesh and ready to defend her home against you, the player character.

To reiterate, this tiny game comes from me following with a course, but of course I want to make all the assets myself, and of course I want to add some extras to raise the production values and communicate a little more story and atmosphere, though I didn't go in with much pre-planned. 

The first visual I created for this project was an object I labeled a chimney. 

The idea is that it's a sort of boney coral, engineered to serve as an all purpose building material. It also forms components of a geothermal power plant, reaching bony coral fingers deep into the active volcanos under the landmass Xenocidaire's little patch takes place on. 

I had no idea beyond that I liked the idea of some kind of coral/bone/volcanic power plant but decided that this would take place in the world suggested by the thread that CRAWLER emerged from. You, a human, insignificant and baffled creature that you are, fights aliens. 

A test of the look of things in Blender before I brought it into Godot. Mysterious alien craft and defensive swarm will be made obnoxiously large I think. 

Why? I had no idea until the idea that I wanted some kind of MGS Codec style pop up mission briefing as a little joke. Writing in the voice of the mission briefer resulted in: 

Commandant Durham giving you instructions in his signature style. 

Splitters, I decided, are what you call a human who's split off from human society and entered into the world of aliens. The source of humans on this planet is the Nigella: a human vessel that went rogue after failing to complete its mission.  All one thousand three members of its crew were declared traitors and sentenced to death in absentia. The Nigellans end up joining the cult, for reasons. 

It's an academic cult--religious in many ways, and not shy about it (religious thought is just one form of contemplative thought considered valuable--mythopoetic irrationalism as an investigative method, the varied aliens sand philosophies all a part of a holistic tool to understand, dissect, and appreciate the being that penetrates this planet. 

"We love you, as we cut you. Victim! Awake!", a thing like a jellyfish with scalpel-rings around each tentacle tip, extracting another biopsy from the great sleeper. 

Cult, coral, and angry humans who want to infect an alien theologian with a worm based parasite. Ignoring why, and now getting into making my little playland in Godot, I decided on a location, an atoll on a planet in the "Purple Forbidden Enclosure".

The "Purple Forbidden Enclosure" comes from an old Chinese astronomy naming convention which I am rapidly becoming fascinated by. There's a constellation named after Dragon Dung and another for the different roles of Eunuchs. Much better than Greek gods. 

Within that enclosure is the constellation Camelopardalis, meaning giraffe. This gamelet takes place on the eighth planet orbiting the yellow supergiant Camelopardalis Beta, which has several alien names that translate to ominous phrases and then the name the Expeditionary Force has given it: Giraffe-8. 

There's something thrilling, in a slightly retro way, when some SF story is set around Tau Ceti or Zeta Reticuli or so on. There's exoticism that comes from assigning a fully realized, fictional location to a far off constellation that's essentially just photographs and mathematical notation. 

A ludicrous premise and a real star has a wonderful old timey SF feel I want to savor in Xenocidaire. Reading the Marathon wiki there's plenty of that, which adds such a vintage, dorky flavor that then creates allowances for other science fiction plot devices and setting details. 

Weapon I'm working on. The idea is to combine a cephalopod spermatophores, which is a sort of moving, spiky bag full of sperm, with a sabot tank shell. The fleshy sabot petals fall away and the horrible wriggling sperm of a gas giant predator that hunts, mates, and sleeps on the wing causes a hideous allergic reaction in the victim as it writhes and embeds its spikes in the victim. 

With the worldbuilding I'm trying to indulge not just in my fondness for backstory but also develop visual storytelling in a videogame context. Here we have an old generation mech, left over from the first human vessel that came to this constellation and his planet. 

The bone polyps are everywhere. In the settlements they polyps are tamed and the residents are inoculated against the spores but elsewhere they begin to take root in anything they can digest, converting biomass into porous, hungry bone. The unfortunate pilot was infected and it spread throughout the mech, leaving a statue of metal and bone. 

Surgeon-Captain Dreske, expert in alien biotechnology and chief vivisectionist. He has advised the PC on weapons, alien behaviors and weaknesses, and talked the player through their xenopsychedelic trip when the PC was infected with a distributed spore intelligence. Maybe all of that will be added, if this project grows. 

It's inspired by the great, bubbly mechs of Maschinen Krieger and has trace elements of the mechs in Starsiege, Battletech's Elementals, and the little baby mechs that pop up in Masamune Shirow's old manga. Expect a lot more babymechs, even just as one offs for the sake of keeping my blender skills sharp.

I'm also thinking that I might use this project as a sort of tech demo. Implementing dialog trees, inventory systems, and so on in Xenocidaire seems like a good way to test out things I want my games to do. 

I'll also post whatever updates I make on this project, if I do take that route, for subscribers whenever updates are made.