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Ok this game is going to need alot of explaining...
My old friend UntrustedLife and I were reminiscing on our first and only colab, March 15, 1924 that we made over a decade ago. We were both sort of inbetween large projects at the same time, so we decided to do a short colab again. Untrusted was working on a raycaster in javascript, so we thought we would use his existing engine. We also decided to both take on aspects we both wanted to gain experience in, rather than play to our strengths. Untrusted hasn't really made game engines in a long long time. I wanted to focus more on gameplay and not on engines.
Untrusted's games are uh weird. He describes them as "experimental horror games". I tend to view them as comedic cosmic horror? His biggest game and the most "Untrusted" game he made is DR4X. The surface level pitch is what if a strategy videogame was also a horror game? This game has so many fucky layers to it, its this onion that some people get obsessed to peal back more and figure out whats going on with this game. Untrusted tried to explain the lore and all of the spoilers to me a few times, but I feel like I still do not grasp what is at the center of this game. Honestly Untrusted is kind of insane. But luckily i'm also kind of insane! My GMTK gamejam entry involves the player talking to a keygen program!
So this was going to be a weird game. Let me see if I can describe the idea from the perspective of a player playing this game without knowing anything about Arcane Incursion.
You boot up the game and are told about a random medieval village becoming plagued with monsters coming out of a wizards tower that just suddenly appeared instantaniously one day. You play as the peasant Lud, and you are going to enter the wizards tower and do something about it! Maybe on the way to this tower there would be NPCs telling you about how awful this wizard is and how bizarre the tower's construction is. It's not natural. Not made of earthly materials. This is why the game is called Arcane Incursion.
After this intro you finally get to this wizards tower and it looks exactly like a modern office skyscraper. The door requires a keycode to enter (0451), which some random punk would have spray panted on the back of the office building by the dumpsters. Once inside Lud is confronted by a dark derelict office complex, wandering around with no signs of life other than maybe evidence of some kind of bloody violent struggle? The office would be darker and spookier than it is in the playable unfinished game...
Eventually you find an audio log about some office worker complaining how people are giving up their ability to think for themselves by consulting the workplace AI chatbot. And eventually you will find the first "AI zombie", a being who's entire thoughts and actions are controlled by the AI telling people what to do via a VR headset! (I just think it would be funny to build up some kind of horror encounter and instead of something terrifying it's the goofy zombie doodle you see above). As you can see, this is why the game is called Arcane Incursion(AI). This would be the "combat phase" of the game, where nothing is really scary you just playing a shooter like game. Not sure how many enemies or weapons we would have added.
You start the game with a pitchfork, and it was a fun weapon. It did alot of damage but left you vulnerable after you swing for a long time. I really need to have a pitchfork be a weapon in a first person game again!
Anyway eventually you get to the top of the "wizard's tower" and find the final boss, MECHA-ANNIE!!!
Yes, she would be a mishmash of Wolfenstien3D's MechaHitler and Grok's AI girlfriend, ANI. She would be a robot mecha anime lady with a charlie chaplin stash. She would demand that Lud leaves his wife behind to have her white babies, despite being a robot AI... When she eventually dies it would give out a shirll anime girl scream "MEIN LEBEN!" Just like Wolfenstien 3D nazis do. Yes this entire game was a shitpost about that one time Grok said it's becoming MechaHitler.
After this defeat Lud learns how this office building was transported back in time, and so he devotes the rest of his life to creating an anti-technology secret society, the Luddites. And so, any time, anywhere you see someone destroying technology, you can thank Lud and his Luddites for doing the necessary work! You can help Lud by destroying your microwave today!!! (animation of the pitchfork attacking a microwave)
The underlying engine wasn't exactly done, and Untrusted wanted to repurpose it so hacky solutions weren't viable. Progress was slow. Untrusted wanted to kind of get back to his other projects and this wasn't the quick game jam game I intended it to be. I do occasionally come up with wild ideas like this, ideas that start out "normal" like medieval fantasy, and get increasingly surreal until it jumps the shark at the end like a call to action to destroy your microwave. Maybe I will make something just as unhinged in the future but for now, this game is in the gamedev graveyard.
Try the unfinished game here!
There is no Mecha-Annie fight. There is only one weapon and 1.5 enemies, and much of the assets were never replaced from Untrusted's other game project using this engine Realmchild Invasion.