what IS Hypnagogia?
the answer to this question has changed multiple times since october(!) and may still not be finalized even now.
I started this project to get ahead of the backlash of Nightmare Below Disney being a troll game, so that people would have something real to look forward to, and as such I had little time to actually think about what I wanted to make, and I settled on remaking NBD 2 (2019 version) beat-for-beat based on what I remembered about my plans for that game.
Originally, it was going to be a very linear walking sim essentially with very little in terms of mechanics. I also was not sure if I would be able to finish this vision and promised only the first part of the game with the potential for more. I was not happy with that decision even then.
NBD 2 was made in a different time, when I had far less skill than I do now. It was actually my first proper Unreal project. It was also an amalgamation of inspiration from every game I loved at the time, and what games I love and get inspired by has changed drastically over the years, leading to me not being happy with the previous direction of Hypnagogia and falling into not working on it for a few months. Recently I came back to it and decided to change everything around, have fun with it, make it mine as I want now.
This has led to some very big design and gameplay changes, bringing it far more inline with something I think is fun and scary. It has also made it into an experience I think I can entirely finish from start to end. Maybe not this year, but I think there's still a chance for a 2024 release if I keep going at the pace I am now.
So what is Hypnagogia? I can't give a definitive answer. This game is going to be weird, it's going to be confusing but my intent is that anyone can beat it on their own. I think the best way to describe any part of it is simply to list my current favorite games and biggest inspirations:
1. MyHouse.WAD
2. Lethal Company
3. Resident Evil 4
4. IMSCARED
The game isn't just all of these mixed together, however there are design elements coming through where you can absolutely tell where they came from. Calling this a fangame in any regard feels like a little bit of a lie at this point, as this game takes nothing from FNaF and even a lot of the references to that one mouse have been removed, and I won't lie and say some of that hasn't been in regards to the waves of trash public domain media recently, but I'm confident I have something different here.
I continue to be surprised by how much support this game has gotten so far, and I hope I can live up to expectations with it. For anyone worrying about it running on Unreal, my biggest focus is optimization with the game and I'm doing my best to have it run even on potatoes. As an example, I've moved the engine to 5.4 so that I could use the Angelscript build of unreal so that making optimized code is faster for me to do (C++ is the worst language ever)
You may have one final question left, why may 6th, 2024? I have no idea why I put that date in the teaser. There was nothing planned. I didn't even remember it until a week ago.
I've also been working on a new personal site, so for things outside of Hypnagogia you can look there!
new shader I was experimenting with last night
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