Fan made Horror - "Xcom"

[Cristian]

Hey,

Thank you for having me, I am a huge Xcom fan, mostly of the old instalments but I also like the new ones.

So, lately(last 4 years) I have been working on a hybrid RTS+TBS+HORROR inspired by the classic take of UFO, in other words, I try to make my dream game and was hoping that I can find some people here who also may enjoy this.
Also please note that I tried to add in the game a more dark approach and I also used inspiration from many old-school alien movies like "invasion of the body snatchers", "the faculty", "Aliens", "The thing" and so on.

Here is a short presentation of my fan-project, if you enjoy it I will post more.

Story plot

It was a beautiful spring day, nobody knows the exact order of events during that day but what they do remember is that all of a sudden the sky turned red, all radios and televisions were somehow hijacked by a superior force and were sending only one message: “the ancient one is coming…”.

Then there was a great moment of silence and soon after, they came.

They came from below the earth digging their way out, creatures of nightmare, abominations of unspeakable terror, the army didn’t stand a chance, human civilization fell in a dark age.

You are part of what remains of army forces, your brother, the one who took care of you when your parents died was also part of the army and went missing during a mission a few miles from where you are stationed with the objective to gather information about this underground hole from were these creatures are coming from. You decide that if world is going to end at least to do one last journey of redemption to see your brother one more time.

Gameplay

During this journey you choose what team you want to assemble, you choose the evolution of each squad member, you choose which location you want to look for supplies and where you want to establish a defense perimeter, you choose your route and you decide the best course of action for the events that will present before you.

Aditional information

- Real-time strategy game mixed with RPG elements.
- Code in C++ artwork in Windows Paint
- Top-down
- TBS gameplay during travel map
- survival elements
- skills, level up system, inventory, resources
- multiple choices and outcomes
- main inspirations: C&C, Dungeons & Dragons, Heroes 3, Red Alert, Xcom
- Game development started in mid-2016 (artwise, design, prototyping/ part-time) and heavy development started in half of 2017, currently we got a map editor working and some of the basic features done + 50% from art/animations done
- release date: we hope somewhere in 2018 but then again hope is a dangerous thing













Gifs:









and heavy inspiration from ALIENS







Also going heavy for "the thing"-lovecraft design aliens


Hope you enjoy

This project is called: Chromosome Evil
If you want more official information about it or have suggestions you can ask me here or find a coming soon page on Steam

[Solarius Scorch]

[Cristian]

Thank you Solarius, that was good motivational food

UPDATE on one of the scenarios
 I still need to add some details in the building and on the outside zone.



The exit corridor is full of dead bodies from the first strike team, the bodies and dead tentacles are inspired from the hive from "Aliens" with a mix of "The thing" creature design. We also added some basic animation of bugs and flys on dead bodies + the animated fog.



And here is the actual Lovecraftian Alien creature.

I only did basic breathing animation and a bit of rattlesnake on his tentacles. The eye rotation is code-based and always rotate towards the target

Monster got 3 states: idle(vulnerable), tentacle attack(most deadly), and birth(spans worms, the one I used in the screenshot).

Also, you can manually target the barrels to deal extra optional explosion damage, oh and also if you do not kill the worms fast they grow




Some extra details: in this scenario, your squad is stranded on a farm(farm also inspired from Xcom) and the fog hides a big creature that hunts your team down so you must make a defensive perimeter and barricade in the house to either kill the creature or find an alternative exit.

[Cristian]

Good news
I had 2 weeks free from my day job so I had time to make a lot of new environments, I hope you enjoy it

[Tchey]

Hi,

Looks very interesting, sadly real time though...
I love Time Units systems, like OpenXcom, Xenonauts, Enemy, and too few others.

What about Linux PC release ?
Do you have a demo/proto/alpha/something ?
A website, social media, other ?


This forum breaks badly with lots of large pictures, making reading/watching the topic painful.

[Cristian]

Hi,

Looks very interesting, sadly real time though...
I love Time Units systems, like OpenXcom, Xenonauts, Enemy, and too few others.

What about Linux PC release ?
Do you have a demo/proto/alpha/something ?
A website, social media, other ?


This forum breaks badly with lots of large pictures, making reading/watching the topic painful.

Hey,
Thank you for the kind words! I updated my latest post, I found some BBcodes that adjust images to be smaller, hope it is better for you now.

What about Linux PC release ? - I do not know, for now, we only got the main PC/windows version planned

Do you have a demo/proto/alpha/something ? - we had an alpha test session on our discord 3 months ago, now we work hard to reach beta

A website, social media, other ? - Sure:
- Steam coming soon page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1035660/Chromosome_Evil/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/16bitnights

sadly real time though... - well we do have 2 points here: 1. The units and action is big but not fast, it means the gameplay is tactically based not reflex-based and 2. we do have an action-pause command mode where you can issue orders to units during pause then hit play to execute similar to Xcom apocalypse but this command mode is only available if you do a certain optional upgrade on your mobile base.
EDIT: oh and world map travel is 100% Turn based

I also forgot to post the new game logo, hope you enjoy

[Solarius Scorch]

Action pause is a great mechanic. Not as cosy and comfortable as turn-based, but I still like it a lot.

[Cristian]

Action pause is a great mechanic. Not as cosy and comfortable as turn-based, but I still like it a lot.

Thank you for the kind words, I highly appreciate it!
Yes I totally understand, TBS offers more control for tactics and concentrates more on decision-making without time pressure, I am somewhere in-between RTS/TBS kind of player. But as I said above, I do try to compensate with low game speed and the action-pause mode. AH also world map exploration is 100% Turn based so its something like reversed Xcom.

To be frankly honest, I dunno what the hell I am doing, I do not have a clear pattern for what I try to create, I mean no actual model that I can follow.

Take classic Xcom for example my nr 1 fav game, the PERFECT mix of tactics + horror (that fog of war, the unknown element was very sinister)
Then take Xcom-Apocalypse: it got action-pause mode yes, I also enjoyed the management part but because of fast action when hitting order execution somehow the game was missing the horror element or maybe I did not felt it.
Then take "They are billions" a beautiful RTS, zombie theme, good pathfinding but absolutely 0 actual horror elements.

What I try to do here is squad-based real-time strategy + horror, and I mean actual horror not just throw a dark theme and a monster and that`s it.

-------------------

Regarding the horror element this is what I got so far:

- Empathy for characters: This is not an FPS so emphasizing with the situation will be a bit hard but I plan to achieve that through Example:1. Each character will be unique( equipment/stats and most important personality, personality is shown trough out randomly generated speech text in result with triggers and situations) 2. The game got Perma-death .3 Character customization

- Adrenaline of making a choice: I want to make players feel each choice matters and increase their adrenaline by not only having perma-death but also saving game cannot be done at any time and it also costs resources according to how many people you got in the squad.

- Phobias: I plan to use as many phobias as possible, for example, there will be a room full of bugs that player must cross (optionally) to get an extra reward

- The mystery of the unknown: many random generated algorithms, dark settings, and difficult based on how you play the game

- Mechanics & visuals: for example, we have a monster that got eggs on his back, from those eggs worms come out and if not killed fast the worms keep growing larger and larger. Another example: a huge tentacle monster that only hides in the dark and snatches player characters. Anxiety can be very fast achieved with such gameplay especially if the player will have the possibility to barricade himself inside buildings and try to survive the coming monsters

- Theme/plot: I am going for a Lovecraft-alien invasion - and when I say Aliens I want to go on a more "The thing", "Aliens", "Invasion of the body snatchers" type of aliens along with heavy inspirations from "Ethereal" type of aliens that Xcom had

[Cristian]

I was thinking of a new way of boosting the horror element by adding prelude maps for scenarios, for example, this prelude map is for that huge boss fight a few pages earlier.Note that this prelude map has no enemies. this map is supposed to:
- offer hints about how can you beat the monster(aka you need long-range weapons)
- offer information about the game lore
- some character development
- tension slowly increases by fear of the unknown and mystery.





---------------------

The second Tutorial stage is done.

The first one was the interior of APC where the player learns basic controls + story lore and some character development.

This second one puts the player in danger and teaches him about interactions + some lore.

The old tutorial was too standard, it was in a building and we remade it because we want players to always experience new environments and situations, we do not want players to get bored. Also, all mechanics will be gradually unlocked not all of a sudden, and as much as possible we try to mix them with game lore and story plot.



----------------------

Announcement


This month we will work exclusively on a vertical slice beta version.




Our main goals are:

- have private tests for users who contributed to our Discord with LVL 4 and above.

- send a version to a very small amount of YouTubers

If you are interested you can join our Discord room here: https://discord.gg/J2E2YWK



I will post here the results later on

After 4 years of development, we are getting close to finishing this project

[Cristian]

Good news!

After 4 years of development, we finally posted a free demo on Itch.io.

https://16bitnights.itch.io/chromosome-evil

The full release on Steam will be on March 24 2022 (3 days away from my post)