IT CAME FROM THE STEAM LIBRARY: BEDLAM

No, it's not the Heretic/Hexen remaster yet THAT'S NEXT TIME. I was 75% done with this video when they gave me a key for that so this video is about weirdness.

A weird, janky artifact from a time before Dusk. Bedlam is a game. It is a game that I bought long ago when it was advertised to me as a retro throwback and then I played some of it and then gave up and then remembered it existed and now that I do a show about this kind of stuff I thought "yeah this is weird and interesting" and "examining a failure of retro FPS design is fun too."

I replayed this about a year ago after someone asked me about it. That part is true. It seemed like perfect show fodder because it was a strange and ambitious misfire.

One day I'll finish the book, Bedlam, which I did find a copy of, used, from a Candian library but after reading a decent chunk of it I realized that all I'd be doing is making connections to a novel that's hard to acquire in a game that's already impossible to get unless you bought it on steam a decade ago. Artificially bloating the video that didn't need to be 40-50 minutes. There are some direct quotes from the book as well as re-creations of events from the book despite it not being the same story. It's strange. Not bad, though.

But then there's also the new set stuff. I've been trying for about a year to design a new set that would scale properly and play nice with camera movement and animation. What ended up in this video is the fifth attempt. So here's some BTS:

So I wanted to make a panopticon:



Terrible idea. Absolute nightmare to keep everything aligned when trying to make something round. It ended up having a zillion different cells like the last set. The fucking forcefields annoyed me and I gave them up simply because lighting all of them properly made the performance chug.

An early attempt to redo the previous set with some better detail. 




One thing I was trying to do (and have been for several iterations of the set) was to have a light behind a fan somewhere that would cast some fun shadows. This in-between cell was both way too big and kinda meh.


That was the cell in the "new set" for a while. I tried to do an updated version of the current layout with new areas and better effects/performance. A lot of these newer resources made it into the new set, like the elevator and small bits of greenery on the rocks. The lack of color, in general, was bothering me, as everything is very grey. All the sets have been extremely grey, dark, and any color was mostly tied to lighting.

There are little low-poly inmates in the background here. That model has been updated quite a bit for the newest set iteration, but here? They're one awkward model in a few different poses:



The cafeteria area looked like shit. Shittier than I'm willing to allow, which is saying something.



Also, the whole thing was way too dark.

So I decided to start from scratch, again, which is what I've traditionally done with new sets. I decided to go browner/orange for the cells. Instead of a panopticon, it ended up being like a carousel, with the much lower cell count (20 instead of "way too fucking many") that were all the same and easy to modify and move. 



I didn't want to lose the sense of scale that the old set had, so I put everything in a giant pit, suspended over water, and started adding side areas until it felt like it all worked. Some offices visible on the side, screens with ads next to a train system....



...and a rail line diagram that will probably never end up in any shots of the show.


The waterfall is a little iffy. The 300th Sewer Count is memorialized in an area that will also likely never end up in a shot. 



The cells all rotate and move up and down on the center pillar. Theoretically, they can all be dropped in the water. The most important thing I wanted in the new set was movement. So lights, objects, the camera, etc, all move now. I thought about doing the "camera stuff" in VR, a thing I tried once before (in the Witchaven video, IIRC) but people complained it made them motion sick. So, slightly stiffer scripted camera movement was the way to go. They're fun as hell to make.


At the top, there's even patreon-exclusive untextured armed guards.

And, finally, after god knows how many attempts, Katie gets a cell too! 



Editors need plenty of energy drinks and prescription stimulants. And post-its that detail a downward mental spiral:


The Civvie cell needed to be less grey, less dark, and less ridiculously spacious. It's a prison cell after all. So there's a little space to move around. Just enough I think. 



I'LL FIND WHATEVER SPECULAR LIGHT IS DOING THAT SHIT AT THE TOP I HATE IT


Teddy11 showed up in a shot a few videos ago, but he's part of the set proper now (with permission from the Selaco devs). A 3D model made to look like a voxel model? Insane. When will it explode?


Floor junk. More stuff people probably can't read from a regular shot on the show. Also, hexagon floors, which are a constant thing throughout all sets because they're cool and sci-fi.

And no force fields. There were yellow ones on the cells in the new set until I removed them and replaced them with big metal doors.

Hope you all like it.

gl;hf

-Civvie
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Patron discord link:

Copy and paste this link in your browser because Patreon is really weird about it.

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