PARKSIDE: DECAYED SOUL MANIPULATION

Hello! This devblog is a recap of the last 9 months, since I started working on PARKSIDE in November last year.

At the start, I didn’t know exactly what I endeavoured to make, other than a strange FPS game with an evolved version of the quirky, off-kilter style I had developed from my previous game (please for the love of GOD don’t play it)… the Immersive Sim elements of PARKSIDE weren’t even accounted for back then.

Dev Mess: The Pants Shitting of Game Development

But… even before I started making PARKSIDE, I had began a different project (which I will one day pick back up when I’m done with my current obsession..) I was working on a first person RPG bash-and-slash-athon for which I had written some story, had some vague tonal goals for – I wanted it to feel like Fantastic Planet spliced with Morrowind, with a twist of Unreal Skaarj-esque alien invasion.

Anyhow, back to PARKSIDE – game mechanics crept in slowly, and in all honesty I had not organized or planned anything in any structured way. First came basic functionality though, of course, and then things got messy. It’s definitely not the right way to do things. A few assets here, add a mechanic, basic and awful enemy AI, make more assets, add sounds for physics props hitting things, make some early music… again, this was definitely not the right way to do things. It’s only in recent months, after a brief hiatus, that I got my shit together. Here’s some very early screenshots:

I have many more screenshots on my hard drive that I could torture you with, dear reader, but let’s move on. After building a test map out of an initial meager selection of assets, I started working on the game’s first “mission” – to kill a guy named Jonas Reeves. Keep in mind – I hadn’t thought very far ahead, and making this game was a sporadic hobby… I was just screwing around. (An echo calls from afar: THIS WAS DEFINITELY NOT THE RIGHT WAY TO DO THINGS!

Story guff: But WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

Between the initial first mission, and the cool death sequence I’d devised, I started to think about how I was going to contextualize the happenings of this game, the direction things were going to take, the tone…. things were getting serious!

Taking a step back, I realized I had the embryo of a potentially expansive, creepy, depressing, and (not too) quirky cyberpunk FPS of sorts… and I wanted to add Immersive Sim elements. But it all needed a story.

I am somewhat fascinated by secret societies – freemasons and the like – and the idea of a character being kidnapped by such an organization, being forced to enact their will while making the choice between complacency and emancipation, was a very appealing avenue to explore. I settled on a name for this shady group – The Illuminated Brethren of Conclave Automata. Over the first few months of making the game, though, I thought they felt directionless – I needed to flesh out a few things such as: How have they remained hidden? Where did they come from? So: I decided that they should worship a mysterious entity known as the Divine Rod (yes, I’ve already heard all the penis jokes. It’s NOT a dick.) I’ll probably divulge more story details in due course, but not right now.

After several re-writes, and also after re-writing practically all the cutscene and NPC dialogue I had written at one point, the story of PARKSIDE slowly came into its own. By adding a branching dialogue system after having already designed most of the levels of the game (definitelynottherightwaytodothings…) I was finally happy with how the story influenced the player’s experiences of the world and the tone, how the game elements reinforced the tone, how the player could make choices that would affect the story, and the subconscious interplay between the three. Even if, while developing these aspects of a game, I’ve come to find that as long as each element is strong, and you don’t think there’s enough connection between these, it will all cohere into something that feels satisfying and believable… I think. I’m not an expert, I’m just some guy, damn it.

I don’t want to spoil too much, but so far in what I’ve developed, both revealed and unseen, PARKSIDE involves a lot of internal and external sabotage, a group trying to take down the Brethren, plenty of espionage and the option to sneak through guarded facilities or shoot everyone dead, disaster, psychological torture.. The list goes on.

Making it an Immersive Sim

For a game to “qualify” as an Immersive Sim, it needs to contain systems that can interact naturally, in oftentimes unexpected ways, to produce emergent gameplay. As I have developed PARKSIDE over the greater part of this year, I’ve tried very hard to emphasise this as much as possible, though not without great difficulty. I’m not the best programmer, or the best level designer, but I have done my best to include the following as time has gone on, having improve these elements up until now, after I released a demo for private playtesting:

• Open-ended levels with multiple solutions to problems, i.e. multiple routes.
• Enemy AI that has capacity for in-fighting, luring them away from their posts with stray gunshots, and allowing the player to sneak past them.
• An inventory system within which the player can acquire mundane and useful items, with pickups such as beer and cigarettes having a believable purpose.
• The ability to manipulate the environment – breaking windows, moving corpses, stacking crates to reach things, and so on.
• Environmental hazards with expected effects – flammable gas clouds, fire that can spawn from explosions and by breaking jerry cans, electrical fields – and making these interact with each other.
• An ability and upgrades system (this element still needs a lot of work, so that it better interacts with existing systems! ImSim baby!)
• Dialogue and story choices that can change the gameplay experience in major and minor ways, such as the player having to communicate via gestures if they somehow become “mute and obedient”…

I will say though, as far as being an Immersive Sim, PARKSIDE has a long way to go. But with every passing day that I work on it, it’s only getting closer to fulfilling the Immersive Sim spirit…

If you made it this far, I gotta say, you must have an inhumanly high tolerance for bullshit… Thanks for sticking around. If you’re interested in following along, feel free to follow the project on X and stay tuned…