Unfinished Game: Fun Survival Horror (Patreon)

Hi all, I’ve been working on a new game and then I stopped working on said game! Rather than letting it go to complete waste, I figured I’d post it as a freebie for Patrons so people can check it out, see what an early game is like, and have a bit of fun with what’s there. So I’m happy to introduce... Unfinished Fun Survival Horror game!

I wanted to make a game that featured elements of your Residential Evils, like sneaking past enemies, limited health, limited ammo, and the sort, but that didn’t rely on twitchy action parts or shooting. It ended up having some similarities to Never Stop Sneakin’, which is a fun game, but I tried to avoid the repetition and limited content NSS has.

If you’re on Windows, check out the next post, give it a download to check it out, but know that the game is unfinished!

If you’re adverse to Patreon but are still curious, it’s going to available as a free bonus with the usual Bonus Art wrap for May 2023 on Kofi too: https://ko-fi.com/occulttg/shop

So what’s there:

Pretty much all the first pass gameplay. A full story mode is there with multiple chapters and bosses, all the game mechanics, an economy, purchasable items in the shop, an equipment system, and randomized power-ups.

So what ISN’T there:

Art! The game has like no art. Any art that is there is reused from previous games or is simply there to define an object’s hitbox. The story scenes are just text descriptions of what should be there. And probably have typos because they’re just notes to myself. I’m not kidding, I'm not trying to trick anybody about the state of the game, this is a screenshot from the editor of gameplay (you’re the green square):

Balancing! The game is 100% beatable, I have done it, but it’s also all first pass balancing, so some enemies may be too strong or items in the shop too expensive and so on. If you get really stuck, just edit your save file to give yourself a bunch of money. To find the save file, search Windows for %localappdata% , find the game folder in there, and then open the save file in Notepad. Everything is there and obviously named in human-readable text. You can edit the other values too and it should be safe, but they might not work properly. Like there may be a default value in the save file, but that gets modified by the game when playing so your change won’t matter. Or granting yourself an ability you couldn’t normally have won’t hurt enemies because you couldn’t have that power at that point in the game. So stick to just cheating money.

Audio! No sound or music. Some areas might be a bit harder than they should be since there aren’t any audio cues, but things generally happen on timers (especially the very last stage). Once you get the timing down, you’ll be gold.

Bug fixes! Aside from the stuff I don’t know about, here are some known issues:

There’ s smearing on first frame of the UI icons- Doesn’t affect gameplay, it’s just visual

Keys and reagents are displayed as a number rather than having icons for each one you have

There’s smearing on first frame of the perk pop-ups- Doesn’t affect gameplay, it’s just visual

There’s no notice on the shop when new items are added. Pop in after you beat a stage to see if anything looks new.

The “Blind” debuff-perk doesn’t follow the player, it sticks on UI. For the most part, it isn’t noticeable but it looks weird if the stage is too wide for it. Just visual, and actually makes the game a bit easier.

So why stop working on it?

Animation, mostly. A whole bunch of humanoid characters that need walk cycles at multiple angles. Bleh! That’s A LOT of animation/time/money to fix on a game that has no guarantees to sell.

I was able to rework a lot of the quasi-stealth stuff into a different game that has lower art requirements and is a bit more marketable, so expect that in the future!

Final thoughts?

I do really like this game, so if I ever become rich, it would be fun to do a cleaned up and well-arted version of it. It’s hard but in a low stakes, silly way and getting caught can wind up being funny. It’s fun to try to speed run it, do a super murdery run, or do a sneaky run where you avoid as much combat as you can.

I really like the lead and her fail girl ways. She’s not a hero, but she tries dangit! The ending leaves the door open for a sequel or an expansion. I have some notes written up a rogue-like mode that would unlock after finishing the story, but that’s obviously not in here. I took to calling her Monica/Sasha, but who knows which identity is which. Here’s some arts I made up for how I planned on her looking.