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A Haunted Dreamer

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Elwood
Author
Elwood
Writer, researcher
CancelledGames - This article is part of a series.
Part 5: This Article

Intro
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I just want to work on some project for once that isn’t fucking CR

Because CR is great but it takes about 200 years for development to move forward an inch

Just something we can look at and go

Yes
This is progressing
Things are happening
I’m doing my job

A. So I can actually have a game with my name to it, bit selfish I know but still
B. So I have something to do, fuck all goes on around here school wise and everything

Back in 2020 Catharsis Reborn, the extensive total conversion mod that I’d been so passionate about, that I’d put so much time into, was floundering, so I reached out to one of the dev team, Pseudonym_Tim, to ask him if he was still working on his own game projects.

He mentioned that he’d been working on another (later canned) game project, Unusual, and had been getting into other things like music and drawing, but was very interested in working with me on a game, quickly pitching 2 possible ideas to go off of:

IDEA #1: A quirky survival FPS horror game that takes place in your large lonely lakeside house, where it seems to be haunted and you have to do various tasks throughout the day (there is a day/night cycle system) (checking emails, checking mailbox, exploring the house, grabbing stuff to eat (you have a hunger bar and stuff) normal everyday stuff) all while not being killed by a “ghost” that is haunting you each day, it’s graphics are all rendered via ASCII characters and has an emphasis on creepy and unsettling sound design, as well as dynamic creepy haunting events that can occur in the house at random, adding a fun horrifying element to it. Every time you “die” by some event you are punished by having to escape a really creepy dream state where you got to find your way out of a nonsensical uncanny rambling fever dream, if you die again while in it then the game will uninstall itself along with your save file. If you escape you wake up in your bed and continue the day, the game ends when you’ve discovered all the stuff you can in your house and solve a mystery of some sort.

IDEA #2 (Tim): Some kinda violent fps shooter game with a low poly ps1 esque artstyle that the dev of puppet combo games uses: https://twitter.com/PuppetCombo.

I quickly jumped to option 1, although both were labelled as FPS games option 1 didn’t sound like much of a shooter and that’s what I wanted to grasp on, feeling that much as I liked shooters something a bit more unique would be great, with the haunted house making for a small scale doable for us to pull off without a big team but still allowing for some complexity, where I suggested a changing layout like what you get in Stanley Parable, where sometimes new doors just appear or the corridors have a different layout.

Maybe it’s a bit over the top or too weird, but the way I think it could work is this lakeside house is haunted by a kind of eldritch creature that sees into other worlds When it changes the layout of the house, it’s actually merging part of the house in your world with part of the house in a parallel one So if you see extra doors, it’s like your house is being merged with a version of the house with more rooms So it could start with small changes like that, extra rooms, then maybe bring those other worlds together more and more So the entire shape of the house changes Or the river around it And the world starts to look completely different

With no real competing ideas we quickly settled on the concept and thought about names, whittling it down to Dreamscape and Nightscape, which later became Dreamscape. Then it was about answering a few basic questions of the premise: Who is the ghost? Who are you? Why are you there?

Tim wasn’t sure about who the player would be, but suggested a theme of the ghost being a murdered girl who through the dreams you help to solve the mystery of her death, but I had something a bit different in mind, the protagonist as a private investigator looking into a disappearance, with our missing person being the ghost themselves.

The house would somehow be a kind of border between our dimension and this other one, with the ghost accidentally crossing and getting trapped there, turning them into this eldritch creature, although they’re not trying to harm the player or anyone else, their attempts to return to our world would be corrupting it.

This other world would be represented by a different larger version of the house I called a “monolith”, that at first you would only see in the dreams, but as the game progressed the two would start merging and you would be able to explore the monolith’s rooms in the day, getting closer to the mystery.

Although surprised by this since it was quite different to his first ideas, he was quickly sold on the idea, encouraging me to develop it further with free reign, though I wanted to keep checking in to make sure the design was something feasible to do, and in just 2 conversations a few days apart we’d already put together our blueprint for what the game would be.

Dreamscape
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A day later I further developed the mechanics as I created the first document for the game, a generic “Game Ideas” one outlining the premise and key bits of the loop, using both the “Dreamscape” and “Nightscape” names, the Nightscape to describe the real world segments and the Dreamscape to describe the dream world. An important element I added was specifying that with the merging worlds, rather than being randomised, you would unlock new parts of the house in the Nightscape by visiting them in the Dreamscape, while being caught by the ghost would end the dreams early, so although it couldn’t kill you it could effectively stall your progress by blocking you from unlocking new areas.

At the end of each day the player will sleep in the cabin and go into the “Dreamscape”, where they can continue their search for clues, the Dreamscape is a kind of mysterious nightmare land set in the same place as the Cabin in the regular world but in a different dimension where the rules of our universe don’t apply, this is a place all humans go to, but only when they dream, usually people don’t remember much from visiting after waking up, just vivid imaginations.

The Dreamscape has its own creatures that look totally different to humans but may think similarly to them, they know our world as the “Nightscape”. Only one creature is noticeably seen in the game, which attacks the player in the sleep sequences, getting attacked in the Dreamscape returns you to the normal world early, potentially leaving you missing clues you could’ve used to explore.

When sleeping the player enters the alternate dimension, the Dreamscape, where the cabin is replaced by a multi-floor alien-like structure called the “Monolith” that the creature resides in.

Rooms entered while visiting the Dreamscape have key items related to the mystery, but since the protag isn’t from the Dreamscape they can’t actually interact with anything there, so you can’t pick up items or observe clues while dreaming. Instead, once an area has been visited in the Dreamscape, it merges with our reality and can be accessed in the normal world, so the key objective of the dream sequences is to find new rooms while evading the creature.

Each day after waking up from the Dreamscape, rooms from the Monolith that the player visited while in the dream sequences will appear in the cabin, this will cause the cabin to strangely grow in size with new rooms and entire extra floors, becoming more like the Monolith with dozens of rooms to enter as the player progresses, these new rooms can contain extra clues to aid in the players investigation of the disappearance, or items that open up existing rooms already found in the Cabin from the start.

Progression wise I also envisioned 2 endings of the game you could get after finding enough to uncover the mystery:

Eventually, after getting enough clues, the player finds out that the eldritch creature they’ve been dealing with in the sleeping sequences is actually the same missing person from our world that the protag is looking for. 

The Cabin is, for unknown reasons, a gateway between the Dreamscape and regular world, the missing person got permanently transported into the Dreamscape without a way back after staying in the Cabin, being the first human to actually live properly in the Dreamscape when awake, rather than only going there while sleeping. 

After spending a long time in the Dreamscape, the person turned into a monstrous eldritch being, half human and half a creature from the Dreamscape. The reason rooms from the Monolith can appear in the real world is because the creature is trying to fully open the Cabin gateway and return home to our world, the creature is helping you enter Monolith rooms because it wants you to discover the mystery and save them, its attacks are just misguided attempts to interact with you.

However, since the creature has now become part of the Dreamscape, they can’t go back to our world without causing total chaos, helping the creature leave the Dreamscape would mean irreversibly ripping apart both worlds.

After finding this out, the player must either work to stop the creature, trapping them in the Dreamscape forever and allowing everyone else in both worlds to live, or help the creature return and end its suffering, at the cost of destroying everything in both worlds in the process.

Soon after adding references to gameplay mechanics, including a journal that would automatically update when clues were found, a backpack for carrying items, which you could manipulate 360 in the inventory, and hallucinations appearing after you visit the Dreamscape for the first time, intensifying the more visits you go on.

Thanks to the school holidays I was able to work on more of the structure, switching the cabin to a proper house for a bit more scale, then adding in 4 Acts for the game:

  • Who is the Professor?
  • The Professors Experiments
  • Assemble the Device
  • Stop the Professor

“The Professor” being our unnamed missing person, Act 1 would be discovering basics about his character, Act 2 would be discovering that he knew about the House’s role as a dimensional gateway, and began poking through into the Dreamscape using a device to rip the gateway open and access the Dreamscape while he was awake, something humans are never supposed to do.

Act 3 would be the player building the device to access the Dreamscape, still believing it was possible for the Professor to be saved, but eventually discovering their mutation into the ghost and the fact that helping them return by widening the gateway would destroy the world, setting up Act 4 where you would close it instead, saving the world at the cost of trapping the Professor forever.

Presumably this would have had an alternate “Save the Professor” path where you would instead agree to help them, believing that if the world could only live on this person’s neverending suffering it didn’t deserve to live, but I never got around to actually writing anything of that version of the timeline.

This time was where the game also got its new name of Somnium, naturally a reference to Insomnia with its whole sleep/dream theme, and Tim started getting to work on programming basic components of the game.

Somnium
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Somnium quickly took on a new value in my mind because Catharsis Reborn, what had been my flagship game project for 4 years, seemed soon to die, in 2020 the game had transitioned from a build based on vanilla Postal 3 as its base to one based on Source 2013 instead, in an attempt by the CR’s founder Mark to free it from major tech problems the P3 build came bundled with, but this had turned out to be a disaster.

Engine limitations that hadn’t existed in the P3 Build were proving to be a crippling problem in this Source 2013 build (nicknamed the Experimental Build), and Mark was too frustrated with the P3 Build’s problems to consider returning to it if the Experimental Build, meaning that if the entity limit problems weren’t fixed, CR would be cancelled.

That would’ve moved Somnium to be my flagship instead and that was something I was actually quite keen on, with CR being purely a passion project there was nothing at the end of it beyond community praise and whatever personal pride I got from a job being done, it was a passion project and passion only went so far, especially given just how frustrating its development could often feel due to its volunteer caused sluggishness, bouts of drama in the team and sometimes just pure incompetence, I was really fed up and saw Somnium taking over as something potentially great.

There would be money in it as we could sell the game, since it was our own IP, and it would be our own design formula rather than trying to make a sequel to something that wasn’t ours, plus something made by a smaller core team that would be more dedicated to the job, so all in all just something feeling a lot more worthwhile and doable to pull off.

Although I still had pride in CR as something that connected me with people and started my path into game dev, I felt that killing the game off now when it had done that job but continued work didn’t seem like it would be worth the time and effort, might be for the best.

So as Tim worked on the building blocks of the mechanics and some experiments with models/textures, I worked more on the story, naming the protagonist (Thomas Müller), the professor (Dr Ladomer Kadoscha) and the house (the Branbury Estate), lining out the game’s introduction in a script doc, where the game would open with Müller in his car reading a briefing document after pulling up next to the house.

The document explains that Müller’s PI service was hired after Kadoscha went missing 2 weeks ago by a relative of his, tasking Müller with searching for Kadoscha, figuring out why he was at the Estate in the first place, and ideally bringing him home, though warning Müller not to take unnecessary risks, warning of Kadoscha being in a supposedly deranged mental state, an observation based on his muttering about dimensions and monsters. Over the next week adding in a short bit of Act 1 where the player first explored the estate.

Although I was back in school by this point it was COVID season, meaning we’d all gone home and transitioned to “online learning”, mostly consisting of irrelevant filler lessons over Zoom or MS Teams that were unrelated to our actual courses, where I didn’t have to pay much attention since I wasn’t even using my cam or mic most of the time, allowing me to get on with other things or just skip classes entirely by faking “tech problems”’ unplugging my ethernet, screenshotting the page showing I was offline, then sending it to my teachers being like ah sorry, it’s not working, I can’t join class, and they wouldn’t know any better. Although to be honest, the immense free time I got from this wasn’t often used wisely, just slacking off playing video games or watching YouTube instead.

Tim was progressing with more mechanics like the sleeping and saving systems, while as we moved into April I added some of the Journal entries for the later acts, lining about a bit of their structure although not getting into actual script, as well as introducing the concept of the Wraiths.

Instead of Kadoscha being the only person to have ever made it to the Dreamscape, others would have as well, but only Kadoscha would’ve somewhat had his mind intact, although corrupted, due to his intellect, turning him into the ghost (or as we came to call him “The Entity”) that hunts the player during the Dreamscape. But Wraiths would be basically what happens to everyone else, they become mindless shuffling husks, though they would scream at the player if they get too close, alerting The Entity to your location.

This also came with a bad ending as well, where being caught by The Entity too many times would see an ending where Tom himself turns into a Wraith:

You have passed away, your only future now is as a Wraith, a mindless remnant of your former self.

Your lifeless body will wander this dimension…

Forever.

This was a little way of adding some actual threat to the game, where you could actually die, because otherwise the only risk to the player would just be being stalled from getting caught, which would quickly turn the threat of The Entity into a paper tiger and more just an annoyance than a horrifying creature.

But this was where the game started to slump, in that April month I had actually revived CR after Mark quit as director, with me taking over and overseeing a return to the P3 build with a small team of developers, although the original intention with this was to just polish it up a bit and release what we’d done as a basic Demo to show off our work, then move on to other games, it didn’t end up working out that way as we were much more successful and productive than expected, that was frustrating to me because I didn’t really want to be pulled back to CR and I was pissed that we were able to get the wheels turning now, but not earlier when we’d had a far larger team, but as much as I had that frustration I couldn’t find it in myself to kill the project with people still working on it, something Mark also encouraged me not to do.

In May I also actually did find myself having to do some of that school work, even though it was still mostly filler not related to our actual courses, and in June school partly reopened in person so my calendar became less free again, that combined with my distractions meant I stopped doing work on Somnium’s design.

Although Tim did continue for a bit, working on things like the menu, keybinds and the like, he also stopped working on it, partly I think because of his own distractions but also because this was a project he’d very much encouraged me to take the lead on design wise, although sometimes he would add his own input or encourage me to change certain elements, so without me feeding him stuff to work on there was no motivation to carry on.

That then became a feedback loop, I hadn’t worked on anything, so he hadn’t worked on anything, so if I ever did get a moment where I felt like doing something, he wasn’t, so I didn’t.

Though we did speculate on reviving Somnium, it didn’t happen because the puzzle elements we were going to include were something I didn’t feel able to work on, and we just ended up feeling that even this game idea had become too large scale, other ideas like more simplistic FPS games were floated but also passed, so when it came to games my focus became purely CR again, while Tim bounced between his other ideas and Postal 3 Ultrapatch, a mod of his that brings features from CR and various fixes to the base game, which was released last year and later taken over by CR lead dev Kizoky as the Ultrapatch Angel project.

CR is still slowly trundling along, basically drama free now, its main issue just being once again the sluggish development, where Kizoky struggles to balance his job, CR and Ultrapatch and recently has rammed into major tech problems with his system being crash happy as all hell, but the revival of the mod has led to a lot more progress than its older days, with us going from no finished missions to 6, including a prologue, 3 Monday main jobs, a Monday side job and 2 jobs from Tuesday, with a 7th well on the way, going well beyond our original ambitions for a 1 mission Demo, and broadly adding a boatload more features.

My move from focusing on CR to writing and documentary making has also taken away from the intensity of my frustrations with the project, so that allows it to stay as my one games project without its slow, uninvolved movement feeling crippling to me, so those factors pushing me towards something like Somnium just aren’t there anymore.

Conclusion
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Even so I do feel like it’s one of the biggest losses of my canned game ideas, it’s one that was just much more unique feeling than all of the others, which were some flavour of shooter, something more unconventional and out of my own comfort zone, and its compact but scary world (or should that be worlds?) could’ve made for an amazing project.

And unlike the Liberation Game, where I never even found or looked for a team to make it with, leaving it as purely an idea, and 1918, which had brief spurts of life but ones that were never really going to go anywhere, Somnium actually really was feasible not just as an idea but as a project, the wheels were turning, the code was being written, assets were coming together, but I just neglected it, partly because of the circumstances and partly because I just let myself get distracted.

There’s no crystal ball, who’s to say that if I had kept it up it actually would’ve released? Maybe it would have, maybe something else would’ve come up and it wouldn’t, although in those few months we’d both been working on our relevant parts of the game which makes me think that had I done my part, he certainly would’ve done his, and we overall worked well together on the game as he trusted and encouraged my design, but at times we would get into stupid animated arguments, sometimes jokey but sometimes genuine, over confusion or disagreement on how things were supposed to work, which could lead to a clash of 2 assertive often stubborn personalities, something that happened routinely over CR as well. 

Those were tensions we always defused but had Somnium’s development been more long term would that have necessarily been the case? Not a guarantee.

But I do kinda wish there’s a world where I’d given it more of a go, then again it’s kind of a butterfly effect thing, maybe that would’ve led me down a totally different path to the one I’m on now where, although there have been bumps and frustrations I’ve become a successful creative, my articles, the documentaries I’ve worked on, are things that I’ve not just put a lot of time, talent and passion into, but things that have actually released, thanks to Massi being a collaborator I work a lot better with, with very few of those kinds of tensions, and me just getting a lot better at seeing things through when they’re in my means.


Changelog
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  • Edit 1 - Added Somnium test video embeds, added CR Experimental Build info video embed, minor formatting fix (line breaks on some quotes)
CancelledGames - This article is part of a series.
Part 5: This Article

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