Posted November 26, 2020 by poorlocke
While this isn't entirely false, it's not entirely true either. Most visions of the future in the 80s looked like an industrial dystopia rather than a serene purple bladerunner-esque wallpaper. While Hotline Miami does a great job with the neon-vaporwave aesthetic, this is more of a romantic point to look at the retro-futuristic vision. Most of the envisioned technology was just panels and monitors of thousands of lines of information that the characters were supposed to know what was being given to them with a single glance. Like when Neo was fighting Morpheus in The Matrix, and the crew was just staring at a black screen with random green characters popping up. Well, I ditched the random characters but kept the exposition.
Now, how do you make the player feel that they are actually controlling a cyborg? I mean, the hero isn't supposed to be a robot like the Terminator but more like a mix of the two, like Jean-Claude Van Damme's Universal Soldier. I decided to use the story and gameplay mechanics to my advantage to fool the player. So, in the game's story there is the POLLUX microchip that is being installed in soldiers in order to assist them in combat. The chip accelerates their biological neural signals giving them quicker reflexes, it processes sonic input to alert them when hostiles are nearby etc.
Since the hero has a processor and augments inside him, why not having him see the world more "electronic"? Whenever the player takes damage, a visual glitch appears like when you unplug a console from the TV. Also, according to the lore, the POLLUX can overload the cyborg's nervous system, causing glitches and malfunctions and the only way to combat that is to produce adrenaline so that the organism can compensate the sensory overload. I made the decision for that for two reasons: a) I don't want the player to be sitting around in a corner and waiting for the enemies to come to them, instead the player has to actually run into combat in order to avoid the overload, and b) It looks so damn cool when glitches happen!
So, this is my vision of the game, I hope you give it a try and I would very much like to get some feedback.
-Poor Locke