Hypertension [with gameplay footage]

Hey guys,

I know I haven't announced a project here in a long time, but I've been working on one inspired around Blood and it's sequel for quite awhile called Hypertension, and I feel the team and I have enough progress to show off some stuff. It's being built for EDGE, and it's also being ported for the Dreamcast and PSP (the Dreamcast version being a little separated at the core). I'd post screenshots here but they are a bit big - there are plenty of them at ModDB though!


EDIT: I reuploaded most of the gameplay shots from ModDB HERE, so you guys don't have to dig through the blog.

EDIT #2: I have uploaded a gameplay footage teaser. Enjoy!

The game is a little different from Blood, in the sense that there are now two characters instead of one, and we're adding cutscenes in the form of "graphic novels", live-action combined with stop-motion animation. The sprites are being built and digitized, and the models you see are from Transfusion, which we've gotten permission to use. A lot of the graphics itself are from Blood and Blood II as well, but we're changing the overall storyline to reflect original touches that we've brought (for instance, we've implemented a full RPG-like dialogue system).

The gameplay will be pretty different from Doom, actually a litte different from Blood, because the two main characters will have different styles, one being paranormal based and one action-based. It's a bit hard to explain, though.

We're planning on releasing a sort of beta next month, so I just wanted to let you guys know about it. It's been active in the EDGE community for awhile, and I thought, well since it's there, I could formally announce it here too.

this looks nice, although the low-res sprites REALLY stand out

Can't wait to try this one out!

The Lag said:

this looks nice, although the low-res sprites REALLY stand out

Yeah, that's a problem for us now since we're using high-res textures, so I hope we can pull off re-spriting the most important Blood resources (out of figurines, ironically). I'm trying to play with the light, make everything darker so they don't stand out as much but you have a good point.

Thanks though, I can't wait to release it. I'm hoping to show some muscle that the new EDGE release carries. =)

i can't wait to play it

Yeah those songs that sample other songs ruin them too!

Anyways, I'm more interested in the gameplay of this. I remember hearing about this a while ago and forgot about it, nice to see it's still going. The only advice I can think of is to work on those texture misalignments, and double check the gameplay/fun-factor with some playtesters.

That's the hard thing though, I'm finding that balancing not only gameplay, but the cutscenes, to be overwhelmingly difficult. It's possible, of course, but it just takes a lot of time.

A lot of the mappers working on the project actually never mapped for Doom before (they either mapped for Source or Build), so I'm trying to get them used to mapping in a Half-Life way (as far as there are no exists, no crazy Doom battles, slower pacing). I'm myself doing some mapping, which I've been picking up pretty well. It's just hard to do when you have millions of other things to do.

Soeaking of the music track, do you guys prefer dynamic music as opposed to level music? I scripted a small section of a map with dynamic music, and it sounds really good, but it doesn't fade out when everything dies, it just abruptly cuts out. That's the only downfall to pulling that effect off.

So... the mod has been deleted?
I can't seem to get into any serious content from the link you have given.

And there's a big mod has been deleted on the bottom.

If this mod is released (disregarding the "mod got deleted" message) and I remember it, I'll play it. Enough negative publicity sparked my interest.

Just cut out illegal content if that's the reason it got offline.

esselfortium said:

Why don't you substitute yourself out of this forum

OH SANP

Back on topic:

Mod looks cool. I'd like to play it.

Csonicgo said:
Monolith has already given permission to everyone to use all the art, sound, and other assets from Blood since Transfusion was STARTED.

That does not seem to be true. Someone named Hudson in this 3D Realms forums thread claimed that but didn't back it with anything but that he had "contacts" and some email stashed somewhere. The Transfusion team got direct permission to use assets from the current owner, Infogames, as long as the trademark (Blood) was left out of it, and one of its members posted some details.

Wow, I can't believe they got it removed from ModDB. These people are relentless.

I'm going to find out why it was removed, and if it was from the use of illegal content, I'll get it changed out. I don't know what it would be over, the Transfusion stuff was perfectly okay - I have an email copy from one of the members stating that I can use their models under the license which it was provided. I think these trolls are looking past the fact that we're putting plenty of work into it.

This is freaking nuts. We still have our blog site at least. I just straight up need to build a website instead of hosting it on any third-party site, so this kind of crap can be avoided.

EDIT: I reuploaded most of the gameplay shots from ModDB HERE, so you guys don't have to dig through the blog.

Wow, these are some whiny-heineys.


myk: the way he worded it I thought he meant for all use but if he couldn't back it up, I'll retract that statement. :P


I really don't get this, I'm glad the Doom community isn't as assholish as the blood community's ambassadors appear to be. That really reflects badly on the whole blood community they want to represent/troll on its behalf.

Since I'm not dignifying myself for a response here, listen:

The point we're trying to convey here is that you aren't a part of this community NAto, go back to Postmortem. It's the fact that you guys have followed me to my native community and continued, despite DW being clearer than ever that we don't care and that this isn't the place. Stop trolling up my thread, dude, it's as simple as that. You guys wouldn't appreciate it, so try to understand that we don't either.



Can we please get back on topic?

Meh. Drama. No one complained about my blatant Duke3d ripoff, maybe that's because it actually looked good and all the textures were made by me.

Furthermore, no one from the blood community complained about TCotD: Apocalypse when Torm667 made that. Again, it was actually a good looking mod, intriguing story and made good use of GZDoom's features. This mod however....

ON TOPIC:

To be quite honest, the architecture looks sub-par at parts, the hi-res graphics look put of place, the mish-mash of high-res and 3d models and sprites just looks plain ugly. I can't say I'm too impressed so far. I have no gripes with using Blood resources at all, I had planned on doing so myself. My problem is that this isn't a good looking project, it looks a little too inconsistent and flat. Perhaps gameplay will make up for this.

Patrick Pineda said:
To be quite honest, the architecture looks nice and the hi-res graphics do as well, but the mish-mash of high-res and 3d models and sprites just looks plain ugly. I can't say I'm too impressed so far.[/B]

Yeah, that's a problem I'm aware of. Mostly everything right now that has been released was at the same time I was getting engine things down (water, portals, weather, textures, etc), so the shots weren't so much to show off the game more than they were to show off features. In a lot of those shots things just look downright ugly because of it. The textures used in those shots were not our own, but we just got finished with a high-res all original pack, and the level designers are learning how architecture better works now.

The biggest thing is that most of the features are done now, the only thing really left is the LUA/RTS dialogue interface and the code I have to do for the original Blood monsters/weapons. Then we can really move on to truly designing it.

Cool. One thing I haven't explained is our use of "Graphic Novels", using live-action and stop-motion with CG stuff...what do you guys think of us doing that? What it means is that we use lots of green screening, set design, script, light...whatever we need to pull it off. There will actually be 5 minutes of live-action film in the beginning and then it will turn to static images in-game. Attempting to do in-engine, rendered scenes with EDGE (like I've seen Z or GZ do) is impossible.

The cutscenes are going to be in comic novel form and when something in the game world happens, it reverts out. I've gotten the technique in EDGE down to a T. We're trying not to make it cheesy: one of the script developers is majoring in Film Directing/Screenwriting. So I think it'll offer a new spin on gameplay that breaks - not like much does in DOOM or Blood anyway =)

NAto said:

Keep thinking of more to say.

need to stop doing that

NAto said:

By the same token, we wouldn't violate Doom in an illegal sense. Do you see us coming to this forum propogating the illegal use of content of the game? I'm afraid your "two sides" argument is unfounded.

We wouldn't go over to your forum and make complete fools of ourselves, I can guarantee you that.

A few of you must be thinking blood is a "work of art" and is your preciousssss. In reality, no one cares, anywhere, especially here, about your lame cross-forum drama.

Chu said:

The cutscenes are going to be in comic novel form and when something in the game world happens, it reverts out. I've gotten the technique in EDGE down to a T. We're trying not to make it cheesy: one of the script developers is majoring in Film Directing/Screenwriting. So I think it'll offer a new spin on gameplay that breaks - not like much does in DOOM or Blood anyway =)

I love the sound of this. Action doom 2 had something like this inspired from Sin City and it was executed EXTREMELY well. Hope you guys can keep that spirit! :)

A bit offtopic, but anyone know some good Blood mods ? The Google turns up mostly broken links or low quality BB boxes.

Hmm, I'll see what I can find - a lot of them don't really exist anymore.

EDIT: Found this for you.

Well I found out why ModDB was shut down - someone faked a letter from Atari and ModDB was forced to take it down. We later learned it was false, but ModDB couldn't do anything about it. Those people are crazy, huh? Regardless, we found a way to legally comply just in case they ever really say anything to us in the future.


Also, do you guys prefer in-engine architecture or models used as architecture? I found out that if a particular scene is "dark" enough, the eyes can play it off and you can't really notice.

I've been following this on moddb. I hope you pick a good control scheme for this. I'm so happy the Dreamcast hasn't been forgotten, there's still hope. I'm guessing this is gonna cost us if we want it on dc if we don't know how to port stuff ourselves right?

We've already ported an earlier fork but it's not going to have the flash that the new version of EDGE has right now (for instance, there's no model/mirror/slope/LUA support) - so it's a matter of almost recoding out the new stuff to make it work for the Sega.

Hey, I know this is a pretty crazy BUMP but just wanted to get your thoughts/opinions on what we have so far. The video has lag, and that was a result of the capture program. =)

I know the gameplay is very buggy at the moment..