crrsh

I'm making a game called crrsh. It takes places in the early 90s. An international organization has put a research base on the moon and sent seven scientists up there to live there and do research and stuff for six months. One month in, suddenly communications with the base ceases, and nobody knows why. After some effort, you finally manage to patch a remote connection to the research base's mainframe through, and now you must explore the corrupted computer systems of the research base to figure out what happened, determine if anyone is alive, and assist those who are.

The game takes place in an alternate-past type thing where for some reason vector-based displays advanced more quickly than raster display technology. It doesn't make a lot of sense in real life but just suspend your disbelief for a sec, okay? The computer you're using is a fancy new terminal with a CRT monitor, but it can also switch to the nearly-obsolete vector display mode, too.

Instead of ranting more about the story and crap, here's some stuff you can actually look at.

This is the raster text rendering system. This is what I've been working on most recently; nailing the look of a Windows 95-era BIOS took effort, but I think it just needs some logos (and actual plot-relevant text that I didn't just copy from a real-life photo of a POST screen) and it should be good.

Most of the game uses the "vector mode" of your "monitor". The first thing I did on the project was to figure out how to make this work. I ended up making my own system of rendering lines using the relatively amazing Vectrosity plugin, which included "making my own font".

Then, I made a simulated computer system, complete with filesystem and so forth, and even an API for me to write the in-universe programs in.

These screenshots don't really do it justice, though, so here's an older build to play in your browser. There's not a ton to do in the demo; you can type "help" to view all commands, and you can "login" as "repair" (password "asdf") and then log back into "root" ("letmein") just to prove that pausing execution of the virtual programs to accept input totally works (thanks, Unity coroutines!)

I'm kind of hitting a wall in development because of real-life issues, but this is one of two main projects I've been working on in the past few months.

UPDATE 31/08/2015: There's now a proper old-school POST screen at the beginning: