Even Bytes Forget (Demo)- May 2011
"Me cup is full up to the brim,
If I were to stoop I might fall in,
At the well below the valley, O
Green grows the lily, O
Right among the bushes, O"
Background: By the end of 2010 we reached an 
Early UI & very close-up shot!
estimated 1.2 Zettabytes of digitally stored information worldwide and as the rate is ever increasing, currently 2 days of footage is uploaded to Youtube every minute, we are predicted to reach 44ZB in less than 10 years. More and more we choose to get our music, watch tv, read our newspapers and even write our scientific papers and study through digital means. Paper is being increasingly shunned as our culture is inexorably, and blamelessly, moving toward quicker and easier gratification.
Paradoxically this abundance of digital information
means long lasting knowledge is becoming increasingly precarious. With this constant march of progress even something stored digitally only 25 years ago can be nigh inaccessible without super specialized equipment, as we move through file formats and technology faster and faster. Even our longest lasting commercial hard-drives are prone to 'Bitrot' and last only an estimated 7 or so years if kept reasonably well. Thousands of eminent scientists are occupied archiving and provisioning for even simply potential future file formats and creating new methods of storing information accessible by our descendants who will have little knowledge of contemporary practices, technology and standards. Let alone considering doomsday scenarios such as the disruptive potential of enormous solar magnetic storms, which could wreak all kinds of havok and cripple our powergrids! The 20th century could actually be the last century to have long lasting physical representations of contemporary knowledge and life. Remember that cool website you used to like in the 90s?
Even our culture is increasingly under threat. It is not infrequently that biographers bemoan the rise of the email and the loss of private collections of letters. Will we see the day when twitter correspondances of two preeminent authors are unearthed - it's not quite as simple to even see last week's tweets as to open a box of old letters - and presented? In the age of week long internet memes culture itself is increasingly disposable and short-lived. What happens if we lose all this? And what happens to all the works, talent and creativity that goes unnoticed or slips through the cracks of time. Indeed much of early videogame history, like film, has been irrevocably lost forever.
The Game: Even Bytes Forget is a 3D open-world game inspired by these thoughts and set within a post-apoc
Surivival Minigamealyptic, 'Noir' world of fog, mirror-like puddles and dilapidated city landscapes. The player begins in the ruined areas left by another player before him, a dynamic world that collapses and changes over time. Emerging slowly from a bunker and climbing through empty floors and crumbling stairwells to the roof of a disused 20th century office block, that is a brief tutorial section, the player is greeted by the remains and tokens of past civilization beneath him in all directions around his vantage point.
Touching the shining white monolithic block that dominates the rooftop triggers a 2D survival mini-game and ultimately, if successful, a flashback sequence. The player now becomes faster, stronger and able to jump higher. A number of these tall beacons dot the distant landscape at every angle and choosing one provides the initial objective and brings the player closer to the final goal of being able to escape over the city walls. The player can create and destroy blocks to make a path through the world and along the way will come across notes left on the ground. Some will be snatches of story, such as newspaper excerpts or diary entries, whereas others will be helpful or not so helpful clues left by past players. The world is not made of static 3D models but rather set kinds of geometric shapes which make it much more dynamic and interactable. At the moment this is limited to a minecraft inspired block world!
The Project: That sounds somewhat intriguing! For my Final Year Project at Dublin City University I created a tech demo and vertical slice of this game runnning a mobile phone. Instead of using middleware I developed my own 3D Windows Phone 7 engine with XNA, on top of implementing all the game features such as the menus and extendable 'screen' system, reading notes in the world, the 2D mini-game, the accelerometer and touch controls, and 2D level creator, with the ability to share and download levels through a web service.
I had never done anything in 3D before, and had limited experience with Web Services and mobile 
Level Creator with tiny leveldevices, which meant a gargantuan learning curve. You can find my development blog, complete with youtube links, here, as well as the player manual here and my technical specification here, which goes into more detail on some of the challenges I faced, particularly with creating a physics engine, 3D collision detection and simply getting networking to work with XNA on the Windows Phone. This was an extremely enjoyable project to work on and I got a huge amount out of it, thanks to Martin Crane my supervisor at DCU in Dublin.
Status: On hiatus. My FYP demonstrations took place at the very beginning of June and work has been suspended since then. The backbone of the game is done, that is the 3D engine, physics, collision detection, motion sensing, 2D avoid-em-up minigame, menus, level creation, level sharing; the game is mired in programmer art!
I would love to return to this sometime; a lot of development went into an onion of a story, and lots of neat touches and mechanics were planned. Not to mention an awesome 'found' music soundtrack; some relatively unknown, some less so
Level Properties Screen. Although if I was to finish this game and do it justice I would very likely even begin again with a professional engine such as Unity.
That said the reason why I haven't worked on it since May is that to finish it as a polished game is simply beyond the reasonable scope of one person. Instead, with the free time I could manage over the summer I decided to focus on smaller projects, firstly SotS, and then BBS. On reflection the iron isn't quite as hot as when I started late last year either. Chain World covers a lot of similar ground, and well is a lot cooler for existing as only a mythical single copy (all the drama aside).
Maybe it's fitting that a game purportedly (pompously) inspired by the concept of lost, forgotten or untapped history and culture remains an unfinished idea. Although, people did love that you could make the phone do motion-y turn-y things! :D