The Call of Wilderness - StepManiaX Video
Channel: normallife
Date: 2022-05-09

Come and play the rave 1997 RPG that never released for the Electron GameStation!

Note: This video is not the same as the one that appears in StepManiaX. I added extra things to make it more authentic that would have been distracting during gameplay, like intentional frame drops and extra sound effects.

This whole thing started as a joke that we thought The Call of Wilderness sounded like turn-based RPG music, and so we set out to make the RPG of our dreams, or at least the fever dreams we had as kids where nothing really fit together.

There was no moment where we weren't just throwing the most absolutely insane mechanics at the wall to see what we could possibly fit in here. Everything was an excuse to try something from that era that I never tried before. I managed to throw in vertex painting, per-object body segment animation, low-res photo textures, and even some custom geometry nodes for Blender to introduce integer snapping and distance culling for polygons.

It's hard to tell what the story for this game would be, but I feel like that's kind of the magic. Maybe one day, we'll see the sequel to Chip's adventures...

The video portion of this is released as Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. I'm not Electron, so I can't release the audio as Creative Commons. If you want any of the assets (barring the 1997 prototype StepManiaX cabinet), just DM me.