Few appreciate how much goes into resurrection. Most probably only think about a body as skin, fat, and bones. Yet, there’s so much more. Even as I tap the final pins into the joints, I must pull back and regard the whole skeleton. A delicate reassembly. Laid out on the slab with each bleached bone in its place, I am still painfully aware that it will not leap up to life on its own. It needs the connective tissue, first and foremost, but then it needs a spark.
That is the journey I am now on: layering on muscle, collagen, adipose. Far from the final stretch. This is the middle of the task, and possibly the most complex. Certainly the most difficult. Every fiber and strand has to be stretched and fixated. There are thousands of individual pieces. A compounding of minutes into hours, and then days.
It will take months before it finally resembles a familiar form.
I'm Danny Judas, the lead programmer and director of 1-900-CULT. I don’t like to talk about my work publicly. For me, the end result — that moment when I finally electrocute this cadaver and let it roam the fields and towns of the world — is important for people to see unprepared. I especially don’t like to discuss it because it’s difficult to stop. Oftentimes a short announcement on the state of the game turns into a multi-page rant.
On rare occasions, I decide to speak about it anyway. Usually because the situation with its development has changed, or because we’ve hit some exciting milestone, or simply because it's been too long since you and I have last gotten a chance to chat.
This is one of those times.
I’m sure most of you are already aware that we are working on a demo. While I’m not ready to announce when it will be released, I did want to share with you all some information about the progress we have made, and what to expect.
What Is The Demo?
For now, I am calling the upcoming teaser for 1-900-CULT the ‘prelude demo.’ It is intended to be a largely standalone experience that combines two levels from the main campaigns alongside some original narrative content. It will represent as complete of a vertical slice as we can produce at the moment, showcasing both single player and co-op experiences as well as our totally reworked weapons systems, visuals, and tons of new mechanics.
It will also stand as a fresh jumping off point for our narrative. We’ve been very quiet about what exactly that narrative is for a long time. This has proven to be the wise decision, as for the first time in several years, our plans for the plot have undergone a major shift. We feel it necessary to really emphasize the changes and our new plot hook. I’m excited to finally present some of those ideas to you in this demo
I know what some of you are thinking: no, it’s not going to be like that. I am a devout Hotline Miami fan and there is nothing I want to do less than turn 1-900-CULT away from the source material. It is a better game and a better story for its relationship with and acknowledgement of the original series.
Development continues, and has been progressing steadily. I wouldn’t exactly call it smooth — part of this stage of development is breaking things and putting them back together better. Like resetting a malformed bone.
What Has Been Achieved?
As of recently, I have put an excess of time into 1-900-CULT and I’ve managed to carve a great deal of the way towards completion. Originally, I had been intending on setting aside most weekends for work related to my Patreon, and then between 6-8 hours of work across Tuesday and Thursday nights. With encouragement from my wife I have been far exceeding that goal. I’ve put my Patreon on the backburner and instead spend most of each Saturday on the demo. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights are now often set aside for the project. I squeeze in extra time whenever I can — sometimes working extra hours on Sundays. Most of the holidays I get off work are spent chipping away at 1-900.
All-in-all, this additional labor has allowed me to implement some incredibly important systems into the game, and a lot of content that’s been waiting in the wings. 1-900-CULT feels the most like a professional game development project that it ever has, and I am very proud of the numerous features I have been able to add. Many will take them for granted, and maybe not notice them at all because they have become so essential to gaming as to be ubiquitous. But it's important to remember that Gamemaker doesn’t support them by default, and while plugins to manage these systems do exist — I so much prefer creating everything myself.
Big Features
Localization support. I have long advertised that 1-900-CULT would be localized into a variety of languages at launch. People often ask me if their language will be available, and whether or not I’d let them volunteer to translate the game to that language. Well, up until late April, it was all kind of moot. There was no way to translate text at runtime, and certainly no way to translate the text in menus. Well, that is no more. I have constructed a reasonably in depth system for caching and translating strings throughout the entire game. This new text parsing system can even display button prompts, which means we’ll finally qualify for the surprisingly difficult to achieve full controller support moniker on Steam. Localized text is stored in the game folder as simple JSON files with the .loc extension. These are extremely easy to edit, and the game auto detects them for both the base game and custom levels and campaigns. Moreover, the dialogue system has been reworked to allow dialogue frames with arbitrary lengths, and will automatically split large chunks of dialogue line by line — displaying two lines at a time. This will free localizers from limitations in how many characters or frames they can use. If your language takes a lot more space to say the things I’ve written in English, or a lot less, the dialogue system will properly adapt. Users will be able to translate the game’s text and dialogue to their own language as they see fit (or even replace all of my carefully crafted dialogue with memes) and share it freely. Everything from menu options to journal hints will be fully replaceable.
Editor I/O Overhaul. As I have been working on the demo, which involves cutscenes and set pieces beyond just shooting dudes in rooms, I have had to contend with my existing logic system to produce increasingly complex behaviors. This was beginning to prove difficult, as the previous logic system relied heavily on a little object called objLogicObserver, which simply watched all objects with a given name to see if a given variable changed to a given value. If the variable became equal to that value, it would target another group of named objects and set a given variable on those objects to a given value. This works well enough, and with support to ‘observe’ global and level variables, I think it could pretty easily recreate every non-dudes-in-room moment in the original Hotline Miami (the van boss in Deadline, the police in Crackdown, etc.) But things start to break down once a designer needs multiple different things to happen on the same output, at the same time. Now, suddenly, I’m using several observers and even chaining them. Logic in the level becomes difficult to follow and edit, and I have to increasingly rely on specially made objects that are designed to work with observers. Everything becomes very fine and incredibly specific, which vastly increases complexity. Well, I’m pleased to say that I’ve implemented a proper Input/Output system very much akin to the one found in the Source Engine Hammer Editor — where every object in the logic system has a set of outputs (like an enemy might have ‘OnSeePlayer,’ ‘OnKilled,’ or ‘OnShoot’), and a set of inputs (‘SetVariable,’ ‘SetWeapon,’ or ‘Die’). Each output is tied to a list of instructions which target other logical objects inputs. When the conditions for an output are met, it fires, and every listed input is triggered. This has wide reaching effects, and greatly simplifies both the creation of logical items and the implementation of complex events into existing levels. It‘s entirely manageable from within the editor as well, making it decidedly accessible for users and developers alike. This might seem like an overall strange or confusing thing to highlight, but it cannot be stressed enough just how critical this is to the future path of quickly and easily developing new content for the game.
Content completion. At the time of writing, we have made considerable progress towards the singleplayer level in the demo. I’m happy to say that its art is 90% complete, and we have begun assembling its cutscenes and dialogue. The co-op level is already extremely close to being finished and just needs some additional editor features to help support its setting. There is also the elephant in the room of how to handle cutscenes in splitscreen -- but we'll cross that bridge when we finally come to it. In addition to working on the demo, I’ve put a substantial amount of time into new and interesting gameplay concepts which have entered the internal testing state. These include a new playstyle, a new enemy, and overhauls to several others. Truly countless small changes in design and endless bug fixing. All in all, this particular section might appear a bit anemic. Unfortunately, per the usual, I don't really feel comfortable explaining in great detail exactly what we've been working on. As I said before, explaining how the beast will rampage through your village will give you ample time to barricade your home accordingly. Hopefully the visuals accompanying this post will be just enough to slake your own thirst for knowledge.
What’s Left to Be Done?
Obviously some measure of this work has been in crafting the appearance that 1-900-CULT is a “real” video game. Some of the features I have implemented in the past and am implementing now are things that not even Hotline Miami 2 had, let alone any random indie experience. That might suggest that the demo is nearly done and all we’re doing now is committing to polish.
That is definitely not the case. What it means is that we are working on the connective tissue. Progression, story, accessibility — all the things that make a narrative and experience discernible from a pure arcade game. We have the scenes, and where we don’t have the scenes we instead very clearly have the capacity to create them. What we need now is the ability to piece them together, to make sure that everything moves like it's supposed to. Like it really could be alive.
Why Are We Making a Demo?
This question is probably not a common thought among those of you reading this.
I think it should be.
A lot of people have asked for a demo or even to play test, and invariably the reason why they want to have that experience is simply to play the game early. Waiting for a project like this for nearly a decade is understandably very difficult. Even working on the game over this span of time is an exhausting prospect. I honestly can’t imagine how someone who only sees the game in little slivers and by the vague images painted by text — how they cope with waiting for this game and how they can manage to be excited.
But you do not want to play a video game early. Especially not ours. We are aiming for lofty goals, and seeing the game without its skin — just glistening muscle at best, and grim gnarled bone at worst — will spoil the fun. The game oscillates between states of slick near-completion, and feeble brokenness. Bugs abound and playing the game — let alone using its tools — can be frustrating. Something is not better than nothing.
Putting out a demo right now is probably not that wise of an idea for marketing the project or building hype. The game still has an incredible amount of work ahead of it, and while most of that work is now little more than a mountain of content — and therefore more fun and broadly easier to implement — it's still going to take a very long time for the game to release. Typically, a developer should try to release a demo about a month prior to their game coming out. This is to stir interest for a period of time while also allowing that hype to burn off just enough that the game comes out to peak excitement and, most importantly, peak curiosity.
Even if the game’s development situation were to drastically change, we are nowhere near meeting that one month goal.
Releasing the demo "now" is really only for one purpose — to be a great exhalation after eight years of holding everything in. Finally, for the first time since 2017 there will be real, playable proof that we have been working on something all this time.
Building something like this is not hard. Sometimes, individual tasks can be grueling. But they are always temporary. Always building up to something more. Always an expression of who I am and what I love to do. Talking about it isn’t hard either, and neither is being criticized for it. There is always an inkling of truth in every turn. Every word said about the project, positive or negative, from collaborators or fans or strangers, always has a little nugget of deeper meaning. It is not hard to program the game, nor is it hard to draw the sprites or assemble them.
What’s hard is to be committed. To see a project like this that is titanic and convoluted and whose development time is overlong, and still have it spark joy. To still want to do it after eight years of faintly chipping away.
The crazy part is that I do still want to. That I still love working on the game so much. For me it has evolved from this fun idea for little more than an ill-fitting mixture of aesthetics to a full and complete artistic expression of myself. Of my relationship to game development and my devotion to Hotline Miami. That is a vision that I need to share. That is an evolution and meaning that I have to show all of you. No matter how painful it is — for either of us.
To carve out a little chunk of it to show you, it's like cutting off my ear. It will be painful. It will bleed. I will grit my teeth until my gums are red and bloody. My grip might crack my fingernails on my sink, hunched over and watching my own wild gaze in the mirror as I saw it away. In the end, I will wrap it in silk and present it to you.
I hope you will appreciate what it means to me.
Storytelling in games, particularly the interaction between mechanics and narrative — that is my true passion. That is what I pray you will find, snugly hidden away in my red-streaked handkerchief.
Maybe it will blow your mind. Maybe it will change your opinion of Hotline Miami. But, probably not. All I want to do is say with a full breath that “I am here, working on this,” and to prove once and for all that it will one day be finished.
When Will it Be Done?
I don’t know.
