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