“That game’s development…
I mean, it worked out.
This code base is fucking awful.
Like, I can’t put stuff together easily.
I’m running into bugs everywhere.
But now shit just works!”
You might know Sam Prebble as Trigger Happy Interactive, the solo developer behind freneticFPSTurbo Overkill.
As Prebble puts it, the only thing the two projects have in common is the first person perspective.
“It stuck around for a while,” he says.
Prebble’s interest in survival horror began through osmosis.
But the funny thing is, I’ve never actually played Silent Hill.
At the time of developing the mod, I never played Resident Evil either."
“Super low-res, chunky textures and chunky, chunky models.”
But as he went to make changes, he’d find players had grown attached to those placeholders.
“The best example I can think of is something as basic as player movement,” Prebble says.
“The mod was very slow.
There’s deceleration on the player speed, so if you stop running you don’t stop instantly.
I took that out in the remake, because that was basically an engine limitation.
But then I found in testing that the game was too easy.
He says now his approach is “basically just going off feel”.
Instead, he’s learned to rely on testing more.
There’ll be new discoveries to make this time around, but the story is largely the same.
“Originally I was going to have the whole island connected,” he says.
“I wanted to have the whole thing be seamless.
But the more I worked on it, the more I realised that was kind of a pointless endeavor.
In the mod, you never went back to areas you previously discovered.
Instead, he’s focused on tweaking the familiar.
And then eventually you’re just thrown into this in completely new area that you don’t know.”
As for what he feels makes a great survival horror game, it’s all down to atmosphere.
it’s possible for you to make something just bare bones.
“That, and trying to make the player feel helpless.
You see that design everywhere.
You have a very limited arsenal.
You have a very limited movement set.
I feel like those two things alone are kind of the most important things to me.”
The Steam demo forTotal Chaosis coming “very shortly.”
