Hi everyone!

I'm Breixo, the solo dev of Ghost Node, a stealth game where you rewire the level.

I took my inspiration from Gunpoint for the wiring, and from Dishonored for having several ways to solve a situation.

The loop is three steps:

- Watch: fly your drone through the level to spot the guards and flag which devices can be wired.

- Wire: link devices together for different outcomes: lights, door switches, elevators, electric panels and so on.

- Wipe: execute your plan and see what happens from a distance.

I'm running a closed playtest at the moment. If you want to try it, the details are in the comments.

I'd also love your suggestions: which devices would you want to be able to wire in a game like this?

Wishlist on Steam here via this link.

I’m learning an awful lot while making this game, and honestly, I’m very aware that I still have a long way to go. I’m sorry if some of the influences feel obvious at this stage, but I’m trying to absorb, learn from, and honour the things that first made me fall in love with this kind of work.

The story takes huge inspiration from the sparks of William Gibson’s 80s imagination, the social paranoia running through Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, the brilliant design thinking of Zachtronics, and old-school favourites like Uplink, alongside more recent games such as Grey Hack and Hacknet.

I’m trying to take those influences with humility, learn as much as I can, and slowly shape them into something that feels personal and new.

Link : https://store.steampowered.com/app/4603230/HEADCUTTER/

Hey Godot community, I post my game here regularly and I just released another prototype, I'm hoping for people to playtest and give feedback on the build, or just tell me what you think about it from the video!

Much love!

You can play the game here

Feedback form is here

Join the discord! https://discord.gg/fD5syruMc

Irrational Games

System Shock 3 → BioShock

>"The year after System Shock 2's release, [Ken] Levine sent a two-page pitch for a sequel to publisher Electronic Arts. The document was bare bones, describing how the previous game's cliff-hanger would be resolved. EA rejected the idea, most likely because, while System Shock 2 was a critical success, it was also a commercial failure."

>"While Irrational continued to work on other projects - Deep Cover, a cancelled game made in conjunction with Looking Glass, Freedom Force and The Lost, a game that was completed but never released due to legal complications - Levine wanted to return to System Shock's freeform, immersive style of narrative."

>"The first demo for what would become BioShock was created in 2002 for Microsoft's first Xbox using Unreal Engine 2. Set within a utopian project turned to dystopian ruin, the underwater city of BioShock's Rapture has become one of video gaming's most enduring locales. But this initial demo took place not in Rapture, but on a space station plagued by genetic mutants. Enemy designs were pulled directly from B-movie science-fiction with working names like 'eel man' and 'jelly man'."

Source: Eurogamer.net

EA Redwood Shores

System Shock 3 → Dead Space

>"Originally, we were pushing around this idea of maybe we could make System Shock 3. And you can look at the Dead Space blueprint and be like, 'Oh, this is kind of like System Shock,'"

>"To do a System Shock 3, you're really tackling a monumental task, to make people happy with a sequel that wasn't made by the same team as the original,"

>"It was like, 'Everybody, get your System Shock 2 copy, play it start to finish, and let's figure out what we're going to do,'"

>"Then Resident Evil 4 came out and we were like, 'Oh. No, this is the shit.'"

>"It's pretty obvious when you play Dead Space, to look at it and go, 'Yeah, it's almost like they decided to make Resident Evil 4 in space,' which is exactly what we were doing."

Source: PC Gamer

Arkane Austin

Project Danielle/Prey (2017)

>"Let me tell you what's an example of something a reporter might not even realize that happened, right? Like when someone world learn that our concept for... for Prey, for example, is based on a homage to System Shock, and they find this powerpoint and says 'this is System Shock 3', for example... That sounds like a small thing, right? It sounds like, well, you know, the public would like to know that, 'why not [publish a report about it], that's fine, let's do it'. What you don't know is that at the same time we are trying to negotiate the [System Shock IP] with the owner of this IP, and as [the company] see the news, suddenly it changes the business entirely, they go 'oh'..."

Source: The House of the Dev podcast

OtherSide Entertainment

System Shock 3

>"It's a very simple story. I worked on it for a couple of years. I had a team of 17 people. We were making good progress. It was very imm-simy. I had a core mechanic that I love that I got married to, to its detriment. We had a publisher, it was Starbreeze. I guess it's okay to say that. They came along and said, 'We've gone into whatever the Swedish equivalent of bankruptcy is, and we're killing all of our external projects.' So, at that point… three years in doesn't sound like much of a startup anymore, but it really is. And Paul and I looked at the bank account and said, 'Uh oh.' And Tencent came along and said we want to go big with System Shock. They said they could go big with it in a way that we couldn't. They made an investment. They kept us alive. Thanks, Tencent. And at this point, if anything's ever going to happen with it, it's Tencent that's going to do it, not us.

Source: Game Informer

>"The only reason I'm posting is because I saw so much confusion about the state of the company and the project I thought some first person information would be welcome. I never suggested we were halfway done, core systems are a great foundation for a game but most of the work is content development which we were critically behind in, both in real assets and in tool support for an efficient pipeline."

>"Was the failure of the project right? It's hard to say. If Starbreeze hadn't gone into crisis I think we would've delivered something interesting with some fresh and innovative gameplay, but a much smaller game than what people were expecting and inevitably disappointing for a sequel to such a beloved franchise."

>"Those high expectations drove a lot of expensive experimentation. We were a small team and knew we couldn't compete with current immersive sims in production quality and breadth, so we had to be creative and clever and weird. And we were on our way to make something unique and possibly fun, but probably not what the audience was hungry for."

Source: RPGCodex

With how chapter 2 involves the use of a car, and letting you drive around, it had me interested, as you don't really see much other immersive sims do this with vehicles. An exception you could argue is Cruelty Squad, but it's more of a side feature than a major mechanic. And with level design, while it is also not perfect, it made me wonder with the future of having larger/wide immersive sims levels that still follow the philosophy, and remain vertical enough to the design we all know and love.

For those who played Fallen Aces, what do you think? I am not saying it's the most perfect, but I can see it opening up opportunities in the future, like with how Amnesia: The Bunker showed potential paths with how the horror franchise could go.