Back to Games: Revenge of the Vintage Engine

Things have not gone smoothly. When did they ever go smoothly?

The problem said quickly – the two old games HH and Snowglobe are made in vintage Unity v3 and v5. V3 doesn’t compile at all. The island – which is the main character in Snowglobe can’t be updated or exported without causing 100s of runtime errors. There’s absolutely no way to bring it up to v2022 let alone translate it to Unreal. The least worst decision is to remake Super Snowglobe in Unity v5. Yes, there’s been plenty of technical improvements over the last 7 years but I couldn’t really tell why I need them – so let’s just fix the story instead.

Fixing the story

HH was my first game in 2012 inspired by the magical logic of games such as Yume Nikki. It was done in less than a year alongside a full time job. Things happen in-game because it’s ‘cool’, levels have no shared style, there’s no game document to direct the story flow. It was just an excuse to build musical toys. That’s not a great evil, but there’s more enjoyment in a well designed reality. Snowglobe did have a simple game document but bringing the two together requires careful edits and merges to both. My first job is to compile a spreadsheet in which every error, confusion, act of magical bullshit etc. is itemised for repair.

I’ll also form a background story to keep the who/what/when/where/why under control. I actually wrote a background story for HH long after it came out in preparation for a remake called H3H, which I then dropped in favour of Snowglobe. Elements from the story such as the BeCon machine will enter into the new game. I’ve not written the story for Snowglobe yet but I have enough ‘map’ in mind to get going on Super Snowglobe.

The basic story map

First Era – the current period with the introduction of BeCon machines, the creation of MyBeCon and the rapid destruction of human society on the surface. A Matriarchal community is formed underground, with men as ‘Cattle’ and lower classes as ‘the Days’. Having killed every available human and now desperate to survive, BeCon redesigns itself to control physics and reside inside human minds. The meeting of this new augmented MyBeCon with Wednesday March leads to the formation of the first Princess. On the rediscovery of Radio the Cattle reclaim the surface and begin worship of WWV Univeral and Coordinated. All intelligent machinery such as BeCon is banned but dormant machines are still spread everywhere and used for simple tasks.

Second Era – in which ‘Farming’ takes place underground. In each ‘farm’ a Princess is formed and groomed by a female owner and captured in an underground fortress or Castle. A Princess creates goods for sale – machinery, aircraft and weapons – and is fed on ‘Cattle’. Each Castle is eventually abandoned and sealed up with the extremely angry and dangerous entity left inside. Eventually the spreading underground pollution of these farms makes the process impossible and THIS IS ROUGHLY WHERE HH WAS PLACED.

Third Era – Humans gradually fall back on a few remaining BeCons for survival. Under guidance of a smaller central intelligence, society becomes based on energy drawn from buried Farms in a liquid fuel called Milk in slang (or Witches Milk / HexenMilch). Language is redeveloped around the needs of machines – Universal is now the common tongue. Although Milk sustains humanity it rapidly becomes a source of addiction. Drinking Milk leads to blindness and eventual death. The pollution of the buried farms now spreads over their surface. As society declines it attempts to seal off the surfaces of Farms to future generations, first by erecting warning signs in Universal and then as language declines, giant rock formations and symbols.

Fourth Era – much later there are small patches of tribal society with only some mythical understanding of history. Each king of a tribe must show their worth by a hunting expedition to a forbidden place. If they can show proof that they have killed a ‘witch’ they are fit to rule. Some kings are lucky enough to access an ancient BeCon machine which may have some imperfect recall of history. THIS IS WHERE SUPER SNOWGLOBE WILL BE PLACED.