I Summoned a Meteor and All I Got Was This Lousy Extinction

So I’m making another game. Another new game, without having finished any of the previous ones. I’m aware of the pattern - I wrote a whole paragraph about the pattern in the first Deep Time devlog, which was itself an announcement post for a new game, so you can see how much good that did.

But I do have actual reasoning this time and I think it holds up. Rex’s Ranch, Noirassic and Deep Time are all big. Farming sims are big. Detective games need dialogue. Idle games need content forever. And I am one person who keeps stopping to watch Jurassic Park for research purposes. So this one is small. Properly small. Small enough that I can’t talk myself out of finishing it.

It’s called I Summoned a Meteor and All I Got Was This Lousy Extinction, a title which is longer than the game.

The Vision

You summon a meteor. That’s the first thing that happens, before you’ve really had a chance to consider whether it’s a good idea, and it turns out it wasn’t, because the meteor is enormous and it is heading directly for the dinosaur island you happen to be standing on. Whoops.

So now you need to get off the island, and the way you do that is by earning your passage - helping the residents with whatever it is they want. A velociraptor wants a skateboard. A T. rex wants boxing gloves, which he can’t reach, obviously. I appear to have a type. A pair of brachiosauruses want trousers, and when you bring them a pair they each put them on a different way and neither way is right.

That’s about it really. You do favours for dinosaurs and then you leave and then the world ends.

The player character is nameless, formless and shapeless, so you’re just sort of there, a presence wandering about doing errands. It’s meant to be a self-insert so you can project whatever you like onto it. It also means I don’t have to model a protagonist, which I would love to tell you was a deliberate design decision but was honestly a thing I noticed about four seconds after having the idea and then committed to very enthusiastically.

Nobody Says Anything

Okay so this is the bit I’m actually excited about. There’s no dialogue in this game. None at all. Everybody communicates in cave paintings, which in practice means emoji.

The raptor doesn’t tell you he wants a skateboard, he shows you a little painting of a raptor and a plank and some wheels, and you have to work out what that means and then go and find one. Get it right and he shows you another painting about how he feels now, which is the entire reward loop.

I like this for a few reasons. It’s funny, which is the main one - working out what a dinosaur wants from three symbols is a better joke than any line of dialogue I’d write for him. It also means the game works in any language without me paying for localisation. And, fine, it means I don’t have to write dialogue, which is the thing that has quietly stalled Noirassic.

The catch is that the paintings have to actually be readable, which is turning into the real work. There’s a version of each puzzle where you go “ohhh, of course”, and a version where I’m just being annoying at you, and it’s surprisingly easy to end up with the second one without noticing you’ve done it.

Gameplay Systems

It’s a proof of concept at the moment. There’s a quest system that can hand out a request, work out whether you’re carrying the right thing, and resolve it. And there’s a meteor that hits the island. Which is genuinely most of the game, and that’s the nice thing about making something small - the prototype isn’t a vertical slice of the game, it’s just the game with nothing in it yet.

Godot again, obviously. It’s the fourth project I’ve built in it now and the first one where I haven’t had to go and learn an entirely new corner of it to get started, which is a novel experience and I don’t trust it. The quest system in particular is much tidier than the equivalent thing in Rex’s Ranch, mostly because I’ve already made all of those mistakes once.

The meteor is going to be a real countdown that you can see in the sky the whole time, getting gradually more worrying. But a generous one. I want the doomsday clock for the tension and because it’s funny, not to actually punish anybody - if you’re wandering around sorting out a brachiosaurus trouser situation then you should get to finish.

The 1.2 Second Extinction

Speaking of which.

The first time I hooked the meteor up so it actually moved, I set the speed by feel, the way you do when you’re prototyping and doing the maths seems like effort. Loaded the game up. Sky went white. Island gone.

Turns out I’d given the player 1.2 seconds to complete the game before impact. Which wasn’t enough time, you appreciate. Not enough time to finish a quest, or reach a dinosaur, or do much of anything other than understand that a mistake had been made - which thematically is arguably correct.

I’ve increased it since. I won’t be saying by how much, because the current number is also wrong, just less impressively.

Art and Sound

Low-poly 3D, mostly asset packs. After hand-drawing every single frame of Rex’s farming animations I feel like I’ve earned the right to just buy a rock, and I intend to keep exercising that right for as long as I possibly can. The bits I’ll do myself are the ones the jokes live in, so the cave paintings, the quest items, and the trousers.

Sound will be another raid on the bundles I’ve accumulated. Mostly I need dinosaur noises that read as feelings rather than threats, which is a slightly odd thing to be searching an asset library for, and a meteor that sounds massive without being frightening.

What’s Next?

Content, mainly. The systems work, so now the island needs residents, and the residents need things that they want, and each of those needs a painting that a stranger can decode without me sat behind them going “no, look, it’s obviously a skateboard”.

This is the main thing now and everything else is parked. And this one is getting released - on Steam, properly, finished, for real this time. For the next three months at least, based on past performance.

Until next time!