So I’ve been working on this project, and I think I had had enough like 2 months again but I stuck through it because I REFUSE to have another project that ends with nothing. Working on this has been a rollercoaster and I definitely learned a lot, but I’m happy to finally be able to put a pin in it. I would love to come back and make this game a reality, but that’s a bit outside my control for the time being. Here’s some ramblings I have about the concept and gameplay.

 Oh and my bad it turns out if you use c# in godot you cant build for html, Learning GDscript for my next project!

Regarding the story:

 HYPER//REAL is based around the idea of a simulacra, a copy without an original. A CEO of a major conglomerate has discovered an alternative dimension and created a facsimile of the real world there using his vast wealth and resources. While the original intention was to achieve faster delivery times using the world as a warehouse and a warp gate, it has since expanded. The Congo Corporation now has virtual resorts where people can now achieve their wildest fantasies, all scattered around this supposedly empty world.

 However, the world wasn’t empty. There existed a population of friendly entities that became known as fae, due to their resemblance to small bodies and flight. Docile and simple, they proved to be little more than a minor nuisance to Congo, until an experiment with their terraforming technology proved the fae were just as susceptible to change as the world itself. Congo could now create their own custom lifeforms, and even managed to use advanced AI to control their thought patterns and behavior. This worked well until Congo found an even greater solution, human minds.

 The solution came around all thanks to the CEO, Jeffrey III, whose son had recently fallen into a coma. The worlds were already being used in the hospital to allow patients some freedom through virtual reality, but Jeffrey proposed transferring the patients actual consciousness into the other world. With the bodies on standby, the project went ahead, and 100 people were uploaded.

 The worlds were carefully crafted by Jeffrey himself, providing his son with locations based around his fond memories of his own childhood, as well as theme parks based around the child's interests. However, the rest of the participants weren’t so lucky. While they did arrive in the world, their memories were modified and their new lives surmounted to becoming NPCs for lil Jeffs entertainment. 

Blah Blah Blah and then whilst all this is happening in the background, rebels are fighting back against increasing conglomerate influence in the world. You (the player) respond to increased Congo drone activity, only to find a Beast has escaped from this world. You defeat it, and Jeffrey pulls you back in with it to remedy some of the issues happening on the other side, most of which are caused by his son being an evil little turd.

Regarding Gameplay:

 Turn Based gameplay that happens all at once. That was the initial idea. I was playing Final Fantasy 9 and thought the system was pretty cool, but it felt a little more “queued”, if that makes sense. I had a go at it and I can definitely see why they made it more subdued. 

 Combat feels very hard to follow at times and did restrict me in the sense it’s kind of hard to build combat encounters without the player getting overwhelmed. The encounters in the game feel a little easy to me, but I’m worried that might be because I know what's going on under the hood. I gave you a lot of items just in case, but there's currently a glitch which stops them working haha

If anyone has any feedback on the combat system I would love to hear it. I was becoming pretty tired of the project around half way through coding it so its a bit half baked. Some effects exist that aren't used and I wanted to add more but avoided it so i could finish quicker. So fights are slogfests right now.

 The cutscenes will be the death of me. I’m used to working in UE5 and Unity for stuff like this and Godot is lacking. A lot of the functionality like swapping cameras I had to code myself, which wasn’t difficult but it made understanding camera swaps on the timeline a bit difficult. When I finished working on the last one, a friend asked me why i didnt prerender everything in blender or UE5 and I almost pulled my hair out. Genuinely never occured to me. 

The original premise ended after the portal, but I wanted to include a level to showcase what the rest of the gameplay would look like. Final Fantasy 9 was the goal, I really like the idea of hand drawn backgrounds with 3d characters on top. But unfortunately I am not an illustrator, so I ended up modelling the backgrounds and rendering them in blender. Making the map a bit more dynamic would be cool, right now it feels like i could've just used a tileset and achieved something similar but oh well.

Regarding Music:

 First time creating all the music for one of my projects. I had a lot of fun. The songs are definitely firmly inside the box, but I think they suit the segments for the most part. Will release under Creative commons 0 at some point. If anyone wants the files before then let me know.

 Also a lot of the sound effects are ripped from a old game, will be interesting to see if anyone recognises them.

But yeah I hope you enjoy the demo. I would love to continue working on the game in the future. Might come back to it, the original idea would have been to make it almost episodic, but I’ve accrued so much technical debt that I’m hesitant. Also working with 3D has been a bit of a pain, but thats my fault for using complicated rigs from blender add ons, had to redo the dogs animations twice because godot did not like working with the IKs. Next project will be 2D sprites render from blender for sure.