The Pfhorums

I’m making a thread here so my sporadic development updates don’t get lost in the discord chat.

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Apotheosis – Please forgive the 17 year pause in development.

Quarantine madness has the better of me. Here we go again.

For those not in the know, here’s the abandonware version from 2003 that was released into the wild in 2007:

https://simplici7y.com/items/marathon-apotheosis

And the Bighouse site from… so so long ago:
http://bighouse.bungie.org/apotheosis/

Here’s the current project scope:

Artwork

• Revised textures
• Revised weapon sprites
• Revised landscapes
• Revised chapter screens
• Revised terminal art
• Revised menu / hud

The new art will be high quality, but mostly targeting marathon’s old school specifications. This is partly due to expedience, but also a sense of artistic cohesiveness. Expect some very handsome artwork with chunky pixels and indexed colour palette artefacts.

Level design

About 75% of the levels will be rebuilt from scratch. Most will feel familiar if you’ve played the 2003 version, a few will be entirely reimagined.

My goals here are to:

• Address general gameplay feedback (big thank you to Ares for the detailed notes, and Shappie for the stream).
• Make the mission designs better comport with the terminal scripts
• Make full use of the updated texture sets and increased engine limits

Sound design

• Redesigned and repaired 16bit audio for the custom and vanilla sounds. (thanks to Aaron for the assistance here).

Other stuff

• Compatibility with Aleph One. The 2003 version runs fine but is missing many details that relied on a modified version of the vanilla Infinity engine.
• Rethinking some weapon mechanics. The nail gun and matter cannon were never quite finalised and balanced. These weapons will have implementations that make more sense in the player’s arsenal.

Here’s what’s been happening since restarting in July.

• Redesigns for the UESC and Sewage texture sets are largely complete. Lava is progressing at speed. The water set is being axed / combined with Sewage and it’s slot used for auxiliary textures. I’ve done some look dev for the Pfhor set but nothing set in stone yet.
• Initial art direction for terminal, ui and chapter art
• 100+ new sound effects designed
• A few new levels are nearing completion. Many others are at prototype stage.

Here's a Youtube vid showing off some revised architecture and textures.

https://youtu.be/cSfBtSfQQdQ

Assorted new textures:

Some kitbash / blockouts for new weapon sprites.

The worksheet for level design is scaring me. If anyone wants to chip in, please let me know.

Concrete textures for the lava set.

Testing an animation rig for projectile FX (click to play)

Some basic concrete tiles

This is all really cool, however, please don't forget to upgrade the decorative pin-up girl on the side of the UESC Gingerbread Man.
The original "girl riding an ESR Banshee" version was atrocious.

I remember having tons and tons of fun messing around with this thing years ago, so I'm definitely hyped to see it making a return now!

Lots of things still happening here.

Here's the new defence drone model.

that defense drone looks amazing

This is looking downright awesome.

Defense drone looks good.
As a matter of fact, it actually looks like a rationally designed, usable piece of military equipment.

Things are still ticking along at a good pace here.

Here's a rough summary of notable progress since my last update

• All texture sets are more or less complete. 300+ new textures designed from scratch for this scenario.
• New landscapes are complete.
• Around half the planned weapon sprites are complete
• I've overhauled a great deal of the explosion and effects sprites with high frame rate animations. This looks fantastic.
• We have a HUD
• We have menu art
• Another 30+ sound clips redesigned and implemented
• MADD and explosive barrel sprites implemented
• Around 50% of the maps are now at tweaking and play testing stage. 25% are under construction and the remainder are still in planning stage.

A few screenshots…

Moist

eager

Looks really good so far. I love the blue-grey and orange color scheme you have going here.

Can't wait to try this out!

Looking good!

want!

Shocktart wrote: ↑Aug 9th '21, 15:17 Backup your Hard Drive.

Yes! do that. 2 copies even.

You'd better believe this thing lives locally on two computers and is constantly backed up to the cloud.