Blogs

Metal Nightmare

Posted on 3 December 2016

Since I have been releasing gameplay for the Red R, I decided I should also discuss Metal Nightmare. Metal Nightmare was one of the games I developed with the 3D Flash Animator program, and it was also lost with my old laptop hard drive. Like the Red R, the quality of the game is not where I would want it to release it. Also, the game ends after the first boss. Because the game demonstrates a large step in my growth as a developer, it is also a major piece of Xatro Games history. For that reason, I have recorded the gameplay of the entire game (which, again, is just the first level) and I have published it on this site. Enjoy the video below!

The Story

Since there isn’t enough content in the game to fully describe the story, here it is! You play as a guitarist named Dan as he is trapped in a nightmare. A voice in this weird dream beckons him to follow a road leading to a distorted memory of his old house. The road ends at his bedroom which has transformed into a shrine holding his guitar. The voice continues to push him until he takes the axe from the shrine. This releases the power of the evil in his mind, and Dan becomes permanently trapped in his mind until he defeats his evil self. Whichever side of Dan survives the nightmare will assume control over his physical body when he wakes up. So Dan must search the dreamscape to conquer his evil side and wake up from this nightmare!

In his quest to find Evil, Dan encounters his own phobias. By conquering each phobia, he becomes stronger, but because everything in the dream world is a part of Dan, they too become stronger. The world itself begins to expand, creating new monsters, new people, and more phobias. Dan must conquer all eight phobia to gain the strength to find Evil.

The dreamscape is massive, but it is finite. Dan eventually ventures too far and falls out of his dream and into a nightmare. The nightmares are strange worlds created purely by Evil, and Dan finds himself powerless in these worlds. He must adapt to the nightmare to escape and return to his own dream. Although the first nightmare was an accident, Dan discovers great powers hidden in the new world. He also realizes that Evil is not hiding in the dreamscape at all, but instead he is hiding in his own nightmare. While exploring the dreamscape to conquer phobias, Dan also searches for the edges of the world so he can explore nightmares to find new powers and hopefully his evil self.

The axe is an important part of Dan’s mind. It is his first weapon and it is quite weak in the beginning. But the axe has a square slot on it. Dan eventually finds an FX pedal which fits into the slot. By powering it on, the axe suddenly shifts its form and becomes razor sharp! Dan finds more FX pedals in the nightmare worlds, and each activates a new effect, turning the simple guitar into a versatile weapon. The axe becomes the ultimate weapon when Dan finds a pack that allows all pedals to be active at once. Using his axe, he finally finds Evil and destroys him.

About the Development

As I said in my origin post, the actual development of this game was doomed. It was quite inefficient, and that caused it to be impossible to develop it further. I had to reconsider how I was going to make the game, so I eventually put it on the backburner. Even though the game itself stopped after the first boss, I continued writing the plans for it. I also had the entire second level drawn out (in MS Paint, obviously), and the first half of the third level. The writing went as far as the fourth boss and all the bonus stuff between. Then all of it was lost when my laptop died. I was too focused on Messiah Quest II to truly realized how much I lost, and Metal Nightmare was one project I still wanted to finish.

Not all was lost, though. Before diving into development of Metal Nightmare, I mapped out the entire world on paper. It isn’t detailed enough to start full development now, but it shows the high level concepts and the flow of the game. I also wrote notes on the back of some of the maps about the items you get in each level. Knowing what the items are and when you get them helps me decide where to put certain obstacles which is a large part of level design. Is what I am trying to say is, with the physical notes I made, I have enough information to develop a game that is very close to my original concept I had years ago. And once I’m done with my current projects, I may just restart Metal Nightmare!

It isn’t too obvious in the video, but the gameplay is suppose to be the uncommon combination of side-scroller and open world. It was written to be much like the Legend of Zelda, which is a classic open world role playing game. Basically, all levels are contained in one large world, but there are obstacles around which prevent the players from reaching higher levels. The obstacles force the player in a certain direction that leads to the next level. In that level, the player find an item and/or weapon that will help the player overcome a specific kind of obstacle. After beating the level, the player can then use the new item in the overworld to reach the next level.

The overworld was going to be a series of roads and intersections. On any road, the player could only progress left and right (because it’s a side-scrolling world). The intersections were like doors which lead to new roads. Each end of the roads lead to a different place in the world. The player was allowed to follow any road to reach a desired location as well as revisit the roads, thus creating the feeling of an open world concept. Most open world games are top-down (or 3D) and they let the player move in all directions. It is much easier to make an open world when the player can move in all directions, but I was also trying to make a platformer game as well, which is best as a side-scroller. Metal Nightmare was a combination of platforming and adventuring.

As I am writing this, I realized that Metroid is an open world side-scroller. Metal Nightmare was definitely a lot like Metroid now that I think about it. Metroid also gave the player upgrades to help overcome various obstacles. However, Metal Nightmare has more distinct levels like the dungeons in the Legend of Zelda. The levels where the player must fight the phobias (bosses) were large places that only needed to be visited once, while Metroid is infamous for backtracking.

As for the future of Metal Nightmare, I would have to restart my detailed plans. When I first designed the levels, I just threw obstacles and platforms wherever without knowing how high or how far the player could jump. My first step would be to develop the physics so I could know how the player can move, thus allowing me to design better levels. Then, using a combination of writing and drawing, I would design the entire game and the story. Finally, implementing the physics, I would add the content into the game.

The question is how will I develop the actual game. Now I have grown so much I have a couple of possibilities. I can continue the madness of developing the entire game from the ground up like Messiah Quest II (in fact, I have created a bit of JavaScript for a 2D platformer which runs in the browser), or I can use a game engine. Over the last year, I have been experimenting and learning how to use Unity, a game engine that is free to start. I plan on eventually making a game with it, but it was originally made for 3D games. It is capable of making 2D games, but it all depends on how I feel when I start development. I might save Unity for my first 3D game, but I should honestly just start using it more often. If I made a game that ran in the browser, it would be quite difficult for me to sell it, while I can easily publish a game made in Unity to one of the stores. I would like to share the bit of code I wrote for the JavaScript platformer so it doesn’t go to waste. I was planning on using it for Metal Nightmare, but I think I will just make a prototype or an arcade game with it, and then I can post it on this site. Metal Nightmare will be better off as a native application so there is still a potential for me to sell it.

The good thing about the JavaScript platformer is that it is inherently open source. I plan on posting what I have soon so other developers can see it, use it, and making their own crazy content with it. That is what this site is all about in the end: sharing my work and ideas with the world to help young developers like me expand their knowledge.

So look forward to the relaunch of Metal Nightmare (even though it probably won’t be called Metal Nightmare), and the release of the platformer prototype!