Carpa Mortem has been cancelled.

[Warning: Fairly long read, TLDR below.]

Unfortunately, any further development of Carpa Mortem has been cancelled indefinitely. There are several reasons why I decided to conclude development, the primary reasons being that the codebase was extremely old, convoluted and basically impossible to work on, mostly because of a lack of technical ability when I started this project, Not to mention the fact that the games genre changed about several times throughout development. I had been making this game with absolutely no direction, so there was a lot of time 'wasted' time developing content and features that never saw the light of day in the final product. 

I would often see something cool in another game, think "Oh that's cool, I should add that to my game" and then spend the next month or so trying to twist what I had already into something completely different, often a completely different genre. Then weeks later once I had a barely functioning prototype I would scrap it because it "wasn't fun" or "too much work" ad infinitum. The list you see below, I kid you not, is how my game evolved from start to finish, across several years:

1. Procedural Generation Liminal Horror Game (A bit like the backrooms, This one I could've actually done in a reasonable timeframe)
2. Proc Gen Survival Horror Game
3. Proc Gen Zombie Survival Horror Game
4. Proc Gen Zombie Survival Horror Game with Vehicle Building
5. Proc Gen Zombie Survival MMO (Yep. I know. LMAO)
6. Proc Gen Open World Survival FPS
7. Proc Gen Open World FPS
8. Proc Gen Open World Rougelike
9. Proc Gen Open World Tactical Shooter FPS (You would shoot targets in levels placed in the open world)
10. Metroidvania Semi-Open World Tactical Shooter FPS (With vehicle race track segments)
11. Finally: A Semi-Open World Metroidvania Tactical Shooter FPS.

The second to last one was when I realised the scope was far too large, so I scrapped the proc gen and just piled all the levels I had already onto this open-world-ish mega tower. It would have metroidvania elements where you had to travel manually to different parts of the map which would unlock new levels to kill targets like in Cruelty Squad. Its a really cool concept, and this is mostly what you play in the final product, although it is a shell of what I had really wanted to make. The "Playtesting Build" only contains two levels, and to ensure I could actually have something playable I had to fill in huge segments of the map with massive invisible barriers and walls. As for the metroidvania segments, Apart from the open sewer area which leads from your house to the first level (which I admit is pretty cool). Nothing about the game really required you to travel anywhere, in fact the connection from level 1 to level two is literally just a walk down the road and some stairs with no obstacles. 

Of course, This could have been improved, and I hoped to improve it with level three which you would reach through a series of caves and tunnels, ending up at a place similar to Cruelty Squads 'Paradise' level.  However, tech debt from developing my game had accumulated so much that development went to a standstill. Remember, this is still the same project that used to be an open world survival game with vehicle building. I know for a fact that there is a file in my project folder which  allowed you to build cars with blocks like in Crash Bandicoot: Nuts and Bolts. Every. Single. Enemy. has a set amount of hunger and oxygen which has the capacity to deplete over time, even though the concept of oxygen or hunger is completely non-existent in the final project. There might even still be some multiplayer networking code in there! 

And as for the stuff that was in the game, it was all completely jank garbage which I had to spend hours and hours band-aiding to be even remotely playable. I had to spend hours and hours getting everything to a usable state, and by the time it came around to making a new enemy for level 3 I realised the enemy code is completely unusable. I had to rework the entire enemy system from the ground up before I could even get started. And once that was done, I had to do the same to the weapon system, all the levels, the movement system, and so on and on before I could even begin. At some point, I basically just said fuck it and threw everything out to try and do it again from the start. But even still, the tech debt was insurmountable. I was at a dead end.  Afraid that I would repeat my mistakes from before, I realised that development couldnt continue and I have had to cancel Carpa Mortem.

So what comes next? 

Well, I do want to take another crack at this game concept again. Although developing this game was a nightmare, it gave me a ton of experience in what works and what doesnt work in this type of genre. And I will use that experience to create a spiritual successor to this game. But this time, with solid foundations, being a FPS first, everything else second. I won't play around with any other concepts until I have a really solid foundation that I can branch off from. As well as that I am testing ideas separately in other games, for example my most recent experiments on destructible terrain in an FPS is part of a separate project.

So TLDR? Don't develop your game without a reasonable idea of the direction you want the game to take first. And when you do find what you want to make, prototype separately, dont try and adapt what you have already to a new game concept to try and 'fix' it, as the game probably already had shaky foundations anyway.

So, thank you for reading and I hope you will enjoy my future endeavours. I know some people definitely wanted to see this game through to the end, and for those people, I am sorry I was not able to complete this project and I let you down, but I promise that I will make a successor to this game which will blow Carpa Mortem out of the water. So again, thank you for reading and I hope to see you again soon.

Peace! :-)