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07/10/09 - First update of the year. I was looking at the horror game shrine and wondering if anyone's still interested in downloading those games? I still have them all and a really old computer, but maybe I could get them on the internet again. Let me know

11/26/08 - A few more thoughts...

Lets look back at this project, where did it all go wrong? Why couldn't I finish anything? Well here's my attempt to explain...

Creating a game is pretty damn hard, for a number of reasons.

1. I started the game having no idea what I was doing. It took about 5 years it get something that resembled a game, and by then I just said fuck it, because I had lost interest.

2. There are so many parts to fit together when designing a game. You need:

Models - The characters, weapons, objects in the level, etc.
Skins on the models
Animation
Levels
Menus
Cut Scenes to explain the story
And the code to make it all work

So lets say your one person, you have to divide your time between creating all these things, using different programs and then put them all together into something that doesn't suck. Then you play it and walk around, and the camera doesn't work and you get stuck in all the doorways, and none of the animation works and then your like, fuck I'm making a real piece of shit. I then you lose interest.

3. Lack of exposure and interest from anybody. Your here, how the hell did you find this website? Even if sit down at your computer and start thinking, hmm, I'd like to play a Halloween game, how the fuck do I find one? I know google doesn't help. You get a bunch of bull shit if you type in anything along the lines of Halloween game. So unless you type in Pig Farmer Productions and who the hell is gonna do that, you aren't gonna find this. The average Halloween fan doesn't know this game exists. Maybe one person will send an email or a post a message on your board. So then your like, nobody knows about this game, and If I release it nobodies gonna care, so whats the point?

Plus it's not like your gonna tell anyone you know that you design broken games based on 80's slasher movies. Just imagine the look on your girlfriends face or your parents.

4. I used to smoke a lot of weed, I mean a lot. So large parts of this game were designed when I was high as shit. Enough said.

5. And finally, the biggest problem I had and reason this game was never finished, no organization. None. Because I tried to do it all my self, I'd keep making levels. But then I'd get carried away, and make a level so complex, that it wouldn't run anymore. The frame rate would go down to 2 and you could barely move around. That's what happened to all those police station levels I made.

There was one where you start off in a neighborhood with a police station at the end of the block. So you go around to the back of the station and there's a big maze made of shrubs. So you get out of the maze and wind up in a shed. The shed has a bunch of radio equipment and shit in it and you find some stairs. So you go down stairs and your in another maze, only it's the basement. Then you come to a boiler room, and cut the power to the building. Now everything is dark. So you find your way past the jail cells, through a few more rooms and up a flight of stairs, and now your on the main level, with offices, weapons storage, a locker room, communications center, whatever I could think of. This all sounds great, until you realize it's running at 6 frames a second. The engine I was using doesn't like huge buildings with multiple floors and outdoor environments on the same map. The only maps it runs right are small sections of levels. (think Half Life 1) So by now I spent what at least three months making something that doesn't work, so I have to start again.

Thats why beta 2.0 never came out.

Which leads me to my next problem. Most of my work was designing demo levels and not an actual game. Kind of just learning to make a game. So every time I worked on a new map, I'd program new code and use new models. So if you look at all the maps I created separately ( And I'm sure I made at least 20) none of them fit together, so therefore there was no game. But wait, there was a game, sort of.

I actually did finish a game. It was a first person shooter called Halloween: Escape.

So your some dude and your driving down the road, then a cult member jumps out in front of you and you crash. You wake up in an abandoned smiths grove and you just run through the levels until you find your motorcycle in the woods and escape. Michaels in it, along with a bunch of cult members and random psychos I made up as other bosses. There's like 5 levels and some horrible cut scenes I attempted. It's nothing great, or even good, but I did finish it. I just never released it. There was a problem with the keys I made for the doors. You had it find keys to open certain areas. The thing was, that keys I designed for the first level worked on all the doors in the entire game. So for some reason I said fuck it, and never released it, wasting more months of design with nothing to show.

But looking back on it all, the main problem was that I never developed some kind of code to run the game on before I starting building level after level. To create a game, you need a working engine and game system. I never had one so the game never got finished.

Basically, you sit down and write all the code
weapons system - I had this
menus - I made some kind of working menu
artificial Intelligence - barely
physics
a good way to switch between levels
working doors
a camera view that didn't suck
stealth - based on the level's lighting
artificial Intelligence

See if I had started with these things and a stable game engine, and then built levels based around it, maybe I would have finished something.

And on top of it all, I was working on a compaq presario from the year 2000 that ran windows 98. So thats the story.

pigfarmergames@gmail.com

11/23/08 - I'm surprised anybody still comes here. My old email address hasn't worked in two years, so I'm sorry if you sent me something and I didn't write you back. It's a long story. I haven't worked on the game in a while. If there are still enough people that want to play it, maybe I can work something out. So send me an email, tell me what you think. Game design is hard and it's time consuming. Maybe somebody wants my files to continue the game. I'm sure I have a few gigs of stuff since I started. I'm still intrigued by the whole concept. Since I started, no actual company has really picked up the concept and come out with any game really like this. In a perfect world where I had the money and the resources Halloween 3d would be this:

A free roaming world (like gta) only stealth based. Your Michael Myers, so you can't just walk down the street and order a cup of coffee. If anyone sees you they're gonna run for their life and call the cops. Then the cops are gonna come and shoot you, because that's how the police department deals with this sort of situation. So you wanna avoid that. You don't want anybody to see you. And if they do you better kill them or bounce before the cops come.

Day/Night - Short days, long nights. It might not be realistic but how much fun would the game be if half of it takes place during the day? Short periods of day - maybe 10 minutes, followed by at least 30 minutes of night. Either way, the game would need some kind of simulated time system.

You would need to be able to enter most, if not all buildings. This would probably be the hardest part of the game to design. Unique blue prints for every building, mostly houses, large neighborhoods. I'm talking about a fully functional virtual town, plus surrounding towns, maybe a small city, but varied environments. Let's say a small midwestern town on one side of the map, surrounded by farm land, barns, some abandoned houses and building, etc. Then you have huge mental asylum/hospital, in the middle of nowhere. You go a little farther and there's a city, real dirty and grimy, like new york in the 70's or 80s, only to a New Jersey scale. Small city, high crime rate. A camp ground around a huge lake, then dessert - strange farm houses, texas back woods, whatever. See where I'm going with this? Lets extend the concept out farther than Halloween. You can be a horror movie style slasher in any of these environments. Crazed city serial killer, back woods cannibal, whatever. The world is yours.

Now lets extend the features out a little, what can you do? First of all wield a huge supply of weapons. Do I even need to start? Yeah, why not - machete, chainsaw, butcher knife, axe, hedge clippers, etc. Each has to be a little different though or what's the point? Different death animations, the ability to hack off limbs, stab people in different places, etc. I'm sure I sound like a sociopath by now, but lets be honest with ourselves, why do we watch horror movies in the first place?

So what else can you do? Cut the power to a house or building. Cut phone lines. Send letters taunting the police and media. If you get caught, you break out of the mental asylum and start all over again. So many possibilities.

How about A.I.? There would need to be some kind of system in place, maybe have one to two hundred character models that go about their daily business. Drive around casually, watch TV, cook, go skinny dipping in the woods, sit around a camp fire, walk down a random street by themselves - common horror movie situations. You stalk, make a noise they come to investigate, you know the rest. To keep it interesting, the characters would have to be randomly generated.

So who do you play as? Well if it's Halloween, obviously Michael Myers. If not, you build your killer. Body type, Mask, and class. Lets talk classes. Like in an RPG, you can choose what kind of slasher you wanna be. Are you a cannibal, where you can eat people for health points. Are you a realistic killer, where you can move faster and blend in with nobody knowing your a killer. Or are you a Jason like zombie, super human strength, nearly invincible. What's you weapon class? Can you carry power tools? Only knives, only hooks, or whatever. Obviously, as you progress, your abilities and weapon capacity expand.

But what about the story? I'm actually against following any movie plots. We've all seen them and know what happens. And lets face it, most of the plots are so poorly put together (Halloween 6 anybody) that I'm sure something at least equally absurd could be thought up. The possibilities are almost endless. You define your story based on the choices you make. Where did you come from? What's you back story? Were you burned in a fire and wanna seek revenge against camp consolers? Well maybe one kills you and manages to escape, back to there home town. That's okay, you can follow them and hunt them down. Then you come back and there's more teenagers you have to get rid of. Then as you become a legend, maybe somebody comes to hunt you down, and stop you for good. This could go on and on. Realistically, lets say there's 6 different scenarios and each story takes 6 to 10 hours to complete. But what if you don't wanna be one of the killers? Well, then the game takes on more of a RPG element. You choose to be a teenager, cop, doctor, etc. Let's say you can pick 10 or more scenarios on the other side of the coin. Each takes the length of a two hour movie and unfolds a little differently each time. Maybe the stories the same, but the killer hides in different places, chases you in different directions through the map. Basically, your playing a horror movie. Your friends are disappearing all around you, and the killer could be behind any corner.

And finally multiplayer online. Do I need to say more? 1. Slasher vs Slasher, 2. Team up and go on a rampage 3. Patrol the streets on the other side of the law in a world full of crazed killers 4. 10 teenagers vs one killer within the boundaries of a camp site, or a house, or where ever 5. Cat and mouse, your the cop, he's the killer. You catch him in the act, you win.
The list of multiplayer modes could go on and on.

With so many things in this game, what can't you do? Well it's not gta. You can't grab a gun and go on a shooting rampage. The emphasis on stealth. Vehicles and driving kept to a minimum, again it's not gta. Graphics aren't important to me. I mean, sure they're nice, but in the end, it's all about the game play.

So that's what I had in mind when I started making this game 8 years ago. I never came close to these goals but I did learn a lot in the process. If you look at the stuff from where I started, to where I left off, there's a huge difference. Funny thing is, I don't play games. I have a ps2 in a basement somewhere I haven't played in at least a year. I still play attention to whats out there though, and it bores the shit outta me. sci-fi shooter are sci-fi shooter. Who the hell cares? I played gta 4 at my friends house and I was bored within 15 minutes.

I think the fact that you can sit down in your living room and turn on a game with another world that you control is fascinating to me. And for a long time it kept getting better and better. Does anybody remember sega and snes, and then playstation 1? The games were amazing. Every company seemed to do something different. You had resident evil, and metal gear solid and final fantasy VII.

But then these game design companies got too big and powerful. The same type of power that ruined the music industry, and the movie industry. Our world is corporate and generic, we're talked down to and we're marketed down to. Just look at a toyta commercial, the next disney fad, etc. The same generic shit over and over, and it still makes money. This is what wrong with games today and I have no desire to play them. But a game like this? I would buy a system to play this. Even something with half the features.

And I'm not the only one. Something like this could change the gaming industry. It would probably open the flood gates for a bit, but soon, I think people would demand more intelligent entertainment. I never sat down with the intention to write any of this it sort of just came out. I put my new email address at the bottom. If you wanna write me go ahead, if you have any ideas, I'd like to hear them.

I have a lot going on right now, but a game like this needs to exist. Nobodies made it in the last 8 years and nobody will make it in the next 8 years. I won't give up hope, even if I have to do it myself.

6/18/05 - I promised I'd be back. I don't have much to update because I've haven't done much work in the past month. Today I got back into the game by building some houses. More should be coming soon.

5/15/05 - Good news, Beta 1.3 will now be hosted by halloweenflash.com. You should check out the site. It has loads of stuff on the films, not to mention great graphics.

5/12/05 - It's been way too long since I've released a new demo. Two or three years? I don't even want to check. Sorry about that. Not like I can make it up to anyone, promising betas that I never released, but I hope you enjoy the new version anyways.Beta 1.3. I kind of rushed it out, but it shows off the new code and graphics pretty well. I hope you guys like it. Unfortunately, I've gotta put the game on hold for a little while. I've got the SAT coming up and frankly studying for it is a little more important. I'll still be around to answer questions and emails, just might not update the site for a while. In the mean time, if you have any bugs to report or problems to report you can post on the message board or email me. By the way, or everybody still wondering, Halloween: Escape, the game I actually completed will still be released when I get back. I just have to work out a few more bugs and fix the music. Well, peace out everybody.

5/07/05 - I've been busy with more level design. It's easy to build a house, but it takes a hell of a lot more time to make it look good. I've got three good ones so far and five that look like shit. I've also been working on the Myer's house. I know I've build it twice already, but the one in beta 1.2 would run too slowly if I dropped it into a neighborhood. So insted, I started from scrach. The new house has the same basic layout as the other ones, but it looks alot better(like it's actually been abandoned) and it runs much faster. It's also got a basement I'm gonna fill with some crazy stuff. I took a few screen shots.