SIGNAL LOST has been quite the journey for me as a Game Developer.
It all started during the summer of 2024~ My friends and I had just taken part in a game jam (Game Developers Association of Greece) and we failed to even produce a demo for them to play (LMAO). Anyways, riding the wave of excitment that comes with developing that game my friend had an idea about another game, and so it started.
BEFORE WE CONTINUE ON WITH THE STORY TIME I WISH to make it known that at the time I DID NOT know what I was doing programming wise - I swear, looking back at it now I have absolutely NO idea what I was smoking. There are things I've written in SIGNAL LOST that would send Linus Torvalds into a coma. The crazy thing is that I KNEW better ways of doing things yet I chose some weird and obscure ways. Truth be told part of the reason besides being a beginner and not knowing how to properly do stuff in Godot (at the time being new to me) is time pressure. Time pressure was a large factor in this. Due to constraints between having to manage university entry exams, later on university and pressure to make the game between breaks in weekends and holidays some of it's parts came out looking schizophrenic. I swear to GOD there's this one function I saw recently that's been in there ever since 2024~ A malfunction manager function. You would assume something is either broken or is not, which is correct AND you would represent it via a boolean, makes sense right? true or false, broken or functional. Yeah well, it seems that for some reason I decided a string would be far better than true or false (for some God forsaken reason). As I said, don't take this project's code seriously (nor did I LMAOOO). I've learnt from my mistakes but holy shit it's cringy looking back at it. ANYWAYS, back onto the story time.
The game started out with the name "World Explorer" and was originally meant to be 2D instead of 3D.
The original premise of the game was that of a space resource managment survival horror game. The only thing you would see would be the 2D screen of a monitor with miniscule graphics and a text box giving you information about your spacecraft (which was a shitty sattelite) and you had to complete various tasks to keep it operational. You would have resources such as CPU, RAM, STORAGE and you would have to handle tasks according to those resources. Some tasks took up a lot of storage, others CPU and all of them took up RAM. So in order to keep the spacecraft operational and not lose the game you had micromanage all of those things. At some point later we decided to add malfunctions to the game, random modules and parts of the spacecraft would break and you would have a limited amount of time to fix them. If you did not (which happened a lot due to pressure by other tasks at hand) they would brick permanently and you could no longer operate them. We didn't really think through or at least I don't remember what the trade of was from this. Regardless, a lot of features from this game still remain in their archair form in SIGNAL LOST, not just ideas, but features - I will get back to this soon.
At this point in development it was very early and we didn't really have any end-game ideas or how the game would progress from this point and on - we were just figuring out the basic gameplay loop.
As the ideas kept on flowing and we kept on adding more stuff the vibe of the game shifted. You were now an AI being overseen by another AI and this entire sattelite situation was just a simulation. You were being tested, to either be kept or to be terminated. The idea was refined further and we were discussing possible scenarios and outcomes. At some point later we ditched the simulation idea but kept the AI pilot and came to make another change, the game would now be a 2 part game. In the first part your entire mission would be to handle the sattelite while keeping contact with Earth as you were heading towards Venus. The other half would be landing on Venus and taking control of a rover and sent to explore a mysterious site (pressumed to be human). We kept on adding ideas ontop of eachother and so and on and on - Soon enough we decided that we could make the second part true horror. As you would be a rover exploring a cave that starts from the surface of Venus heading deeper into an unknown (quite literally, we thought from an undeground city, to a monster to a portal yet never ended up on a solid idea). However, the game couldn't work with a rover if it was just 2D.
We decided to make the game 3D
That was one of the cornerstone choices that shaped SIGNAL LOST into what it is today. But much like in-game humanity cut corners - so did I (somewhat - mistakenly I will say - not ill'willed but it was a lucky accident)
A little thing that's not very known is that the main monitor screen on which you typically write commands and what not is actually the 2D monitor from the first version of World Explorer. Yes, wanna know why that is the case? cause my dumb fucking ass made it a 3D game while it was pretending to be 2D. This entire time, the entire thing you were watching was actually just a Label3D with a lot of string editing. THIS, came at a clutch, somehow my dumbass set myself up for success cause now I didn't have to move OR change anything (YUPPIE) I saved 7 minutes. Now we were bringing the game into a new league entirely, the stakes were higher.
And thus we would come to make another big change to the game. SIGNAL LOST would now get it's name, as well as it's story. We decided to change the game up entirely story-wise and gameplaywise. Specifically, simplifying and smoothing out the gameplay and streamlining the story while keeping the scope smaller. Our previous vision while possible was very long and would need us to basically work on 2 games. It was ambitious (not that this is bad) but I barely knew how to make things and that would be a recipe for disaster. The story would now come to make a lot more sense.
You were a brave pilot (In truth you were a brain in a jar with a computer apparatus attached to you) flying a rustbucket sent by Castle Industries to find out just what in the fuck happened out on venus. The idea was to connect it with our previous Jam Game but entirely that was dropped too - Soon enough an amazing story writter would be hired to polish up the plot of SIGNAL LOST and they truly did. The story now made a lot of sense and was streamlined. The gameplay was also streamlined. We focused on keeping it simpler and far less complex compared to World Explorer (which had far more advanced commands/tasks) while also keeping it fun. I had to write up a lot of new features into game, such as an interaction system for the various objects within the (now escape pod) which also went through a lot of changes. For example, the repair modules found on the back of the escapepod went through 1 general change and multiple of polish/play changes themselves.
Now, I said this line "Regardless, a lot of features from this game still remain in their archair form in SIGNAL LOST, not just ideas, but features"
And that actually holds true. Similar to what I said about the main monitor screen, this also holds true for some of the tasks, such as FLIC & multitudes of the executable tasks. Flic originally would show a little sattelite spin around in the corner of the screen. Likewise the computer startup seen when the game boots up after a newgame is very old as well and has gone through a lot of changes and additions. Most of the text seen was even stolen from a previous project I did which I canned. There was also a feature called "Compass". If you were to pay attention, next to the bottom of the task screen there's another smaller tall thin screen looking directly at the player. That used to have the little sattelite from world explorer rotating around when you would execute a FLIC. I canned it cause I had issues with the way it would be drawn on the screen from another camera and various weird visual issues. Later on that would also be used for the proposal of the energy system - a gameplay feature tied directly to power managment. Executing flics would take up power and what not. Ultimately this was canned as well cause it was proposed way too late into development and we didn't have enough time - besides, we would need to rewrite a lot of things so it was canned as well.
My favourite features
Signal Script
Signal script has to be my most favourite feature. The need and the idea came to create Signal Script as a means to control the game's progression. (If you are to right now go to the game files and enter the configs folder you'll see multiple txt files. Those are ALL signal script and it's fully accessible to all of players. Changing it essentially allows you to mod the game. You can make your own runs, you can make it harder, ect.) The way that SIGNAL LOST works is that there's this system we called "MILESTONES" which we actually had from pretty far back, just right after world explorer was changed to SIGNAL LOST. The idea is that by completing a set amount of tasks they would be added to a task counter and when a threshold would be reached it would trigger a chain of events. That's what a milestone is and they are what makes the story and the game happen. It's also one of the most properly written parts of the game (while it could be better definetly) I'm still proud of it and me at the time of making it. It made developing the tutorial & the game's main story line very easy. Another advantage when it comes to signal script is that it makes saving/loading the game at different states very easy. Signal script when written has to be compiled into a version the game understands. This happens via a stack. Thus it's easy to just copy the stack and paste it into a txt and then just get this already filtered and compiled version and just reimport it.
I will keep this concept of a game-sense specific language that can be easily edited by anyone for my future projects (If applicable). It makes modding far easier and more accessible. My idea is that for basic game additions, such as weapons, consumables, enemies, ect - if you didn't wish to stray off from vanilla game functionality and just wished to modify stats or just add new stuff using vanilla functions then you could do so via a very simple language. Not Json, Not Lua nor C/C++. Which could then be compiled into something the game understands upon startup.
Atmopshere & My final note
I love the way the game's atmosphere turned out - although I'll have to say I feel numb to it in the sense that it doesn't feel exactly as amazing as it could be, although it is a very distinct color. It feels dirty, rusty to the touch, cold yet a little warmth can be found. Playing this game makes me feel like I'm eating a crunchy porkchop that has been bathed in salt and lemon juice with my hands - while being craweld up, laying down on the cold concrete with a metal panel as a blanket next to a concrete lamp post pole on a silent winter night.(crazy to picture ikr). It just feels dirty, lived in and makeshift but at the same time somehow sterile clean and hostile.
Maybe I didn't phrase that correctly, maybe I did. You'll come to see more works of me though, ones that are entirely directed soley by me, you'll eventually understand some of those stimuli - cold and dirty water being kept out of touch with your skin just by a thin layer of your hazard suit, gas that will make you feel like coughing out your lungs being gatekept by a mask that turns it into warm sweet air - thick springs of white salt trying to bend and breaking leaving a tingling sensation on your tounge, watering even. You will come to experience the joys of my creations hopefuly.