Hello everyone!

Welcome to the first development update for Station 015.  It's been a good long while since I last posted about this project and it's finally time to update you all on how development is progressing and where things are at now.

As some of you may be aware, when I announced this game I said that I hoped to get an early playable demo out to players by the end of Q1 2025.  As we can see, it is no longer Q1 and yet, there is no demo.  This is obviously a little disappointing (including for me) but, not to worry, as it turns out I am getting very close to releasing it now.  There isn't a whole lot left to add and so I should definitely have something out by the end of Q2 at the very latest - in fact, I am fairly confident at the moment that it won't take longer than another month or two.  With that out of the way, let's get to it.

What is Station 015?

That's a good question, so I'll start with this short teaser trailer that I've just made.  This was entirely made using the current prototype levels and I'm quite pleased with how it turned out.

Station 015, as you can see, is a first-person sci-fi horror game set on a derelict space station.  Major inspiration has come from classic horror games such as Alien: Isolation and Amnesia: The Dark Descent, with much of the gameplay revolving around avoiding monsters and puzzle-solving.  Ultimately, the goal is to escape the space station and make it to safety.

So far in this early prototype, a lot of the core mechanics have already been implemented.  Some highlights include:

• A flexible trigger system for designing puzzles
• The ability to pick up and throw various objects
• Notes that provide insight into the situation on the space station and reveal clues for the puzzles

I have spent a lot of time on these mechanics, and in the next update I will go into a lot more detail on the technical side of things and how Station 015's design improves upon that of Haunted's.  However, over the past few months I have also been working on a number of new mechanics which I will be focusing on in this update.  So, what's new in the prototype?

Hints

Something that was lacking in Haunted was a proper in-game tutorial system.  This was a deliberate choice as I wanted to emulate the feel of a true 90's game there, so the actual "tutorial" was contained in the game's manual.  That was where you would find the default controls and learn how to play the game.

For Station 015, this isn't the case, and players will most likely not be expecting (or willing) to trawl through a manual to find out how to play.  However, I still didn't want to have tutorial screens popping up and breaking the immersion.  The solution?  Subtle hints that appear on-screen in the right circumstances.

Here I have just picked up the flashlight for the first time, and the game is letting me know the control for turning it on and off.  This prompt is generated from the actual keybinding for the flashlight, so it will still show the correct key even if you've changed it.  This system will be integrated with another one, which I'm currently referring to as the Journal (once that has been implemented) - this will show you hints about what to do next and help you to navigate the level.

Computers

In keeping with the sci-fi aesthetic, computers are an essential addition for revealing the lore of the game and even to control parts of the levels.  The system I've designed for these is fully interactive and allows various different terminals and workstations to be used to solve puzzles.  Here's a couple of examples.

In the "security" room we can manage the "lockdown" that is currently in progress.  That lockdown is the reason why the alarms are currently screaming, and as you'll find in the message exchanges from here, this isn't the first time that a lockdown has been triggered.  In fact, before the monsters caused all hell to break loose, generator malfunctions were causing regular "false positives" that made some station employees lose their minds!

In the "generator" room are instructions for restoring the power.  This is the main objective in the first level.

In the "hangar" we have some lore on this terminal.  This shipment is fairly mundane, but buried in the next receipts are signs that something is going badly wrong...

Monsters

Saving the best for last, this one sounds exciting right?  It is true, in the current prototype there is actually a monster.  However, there's a reason it isn't being shown in the trailer...

...Because this is what it looks like at the moment!  While it is kind of funny, this test monster is actually what is making the noises at the end of the teaser trailer.  But, you may be wondering, why does it look like this at the moment?

That's a fair question, and actually there's a really good reason to make this bad-looking test monster before committing to modelling a proper one.  It allows me to design and develop the mechanics beforehand, and more importantly, allows me to figure out if the design I'd planned will actually work in practice.  The current idea behind the monsters is that they are completely blind, and so they will primarily react to the sounds you make rather than actually "seeing" you.  This sounds simple in theory, but has proven to be quite difficult to implement.  For example, how does a monster know when a player has made a sound, and the sound wasn't caused by it bumping into something?  That is a very real problem that I am still working on solving, and that is something I can work on thanks to this quickly thrown together "programmer art".

Another mechanic I have been trying to get right is the animation.  I've opted to try procedural animation for the monster, which in-short means animation through code.  In some ways, this method is harder than traditional animation in a modelling tool like Blender.  However, it does allow me to do things like this...

Here, the monster has positioned its legs on the wall as it was standing fairly close to it.  This leads to some very interesting movement, and sometimes in this level the monster will actually be running fully on the walls to reach a sound that annoyed it.  It looks pretty creepy when it does that, but again there are some bugs to sort out before I can release the demo - especially when trying to combine different systems with the monster mechanics.

An interesting side-effect of some of the mechanics I've implemented is this.

The monster is blind, so as long as you don't upset it by making too much noise (or by bumping into it), it is possible to watch it walk right over the top of you!  One of my plans is to turn this into a feature of one of the levels, creating a nasty encounter with a monster.

And of course, it is possible to upset the monster...

It doesn't look very good yet with the test model, but here I am being attacked by the monster.  It isn't a one-hit kill but the monster will do a hefty amount of damage each time it attacks, so you will struggle to get away from it successfully once it's started chasing you!

Future Plans

As I said at the beginning of this update, I think I'm quite close to getting a playable demo out for people to enjoy, and more importantly give feedback on.  Here's what's left to do:

• Design a new monster model, which should be just a drop-in replacement for the current test model
• Fix the bugs with the monster movement and sound-targeting logic
• Implement the puzzle for the second level
• Give the second level a good test to make sure it is a) possible to complete and b) actually intuitive and fun to play through
• Implement a pause menu and an options menu for quality-of-life settings (including full key rebinding)

The next steps after this are to finish the demo, which I hope to be able to do by the end of 2025.  Here's a few of the features that need implementing for that:

• A full save system (including checkpoints to autosave the game throughout each level)
• Two new levels (one of which will replace the second level in the current prototype)
• A new type of monster

That's it for this update.  I'm not sure when the next one will be but hopefully it won't take too long, and with any luck there will be a new demo to go with it.  Until then, thanks for reading!