Tesseract : A procedural FPS Prototype Postmortem

So on the SA forums I’ve been participating in biweekly game jams. Sometimes I’ve made stuff, and sometimes I haven’t, but this week I feel I made something pretty decent at least from a prototype standpoint.

Tesseract is an FPS consisting entirely of procedurally generated levels. Currently the prototype only runs the player through 10 of them, just to get an idea for what’s going on. I made it in about a week using Unity, doing just about everything myself although most art assets and some pieces of code were taken from free resources on the Internet.

What originally inspired me to create Tesseract was the idea of taking concepts from Roguelikes (randomly generated levels, one life to live, permadeath, etc.) and put them into an FPS. Along the way however I think I got a bit hung up on the FPS aspects and less on the Roguelike aspect, but I’ll get to that.

Getting Psyched 20 years on

Wolfenstein 3D turns 20 today. Suddenly I feel old considering it was one of the first computer games I ever played, and also was the first FPS I ever played. I had received the shareware first episode of Wolfenstein 3D for Christmas as a stocking stuffer via my Parents. Of course once my dad actually saw what the game entailed (killing Nazis and stealing their gold), he was taken aback and thus the next 7 to 11 years were spent by my parents trying to keep me from playing any more FPS games. This in retrospect was perfectly understandable but that’s not what this very short article is about

Wolfenstein has not aged well, and more people have fonder memories of Doom than they do of Wolfenstein. That’s fine, I get that, but the game will always hold a place for me as teaching me what the word “pysched” meant, as well as exposing me to the wonders of the third dimension (well, second-and-a-half dimension). It also probably contributed to my desire to try and 100% games even when it’s near-impossible, thanks to that Secrets tally.

I know I haven’t really been posting much and that’s mostly because there hasn’t been much to post, and I’ve been kinda swamped at my job. However I hope in the coming months to be able to show some things off. Until then…

…hmm…”Get Psyched” doesn’t work here does it?