Activate Sam Prebble of Happy Happy Happing about perfecting the horror of Total Chaos – and for the first time playing the classics of this genre

“Stepping out of Turbo Overkill is great,” Sam Prebble of Happy Happy told me about the call. “The development of that game … I mean, it was successful. But it was very messy because it was my first game and I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.

You can know Sam Prebble is Trigger Happy Interactive, solo developer behind French FPS Turbo Overkill. Before that, he had followed another name, associated with a very different project. Total Chaos, for the first time released in 2018 under the nickname Wadaholic, is a completely converted MOM for Doom 2. With the focus on the horror atmosphere of the thick survival of stress and insurination, it has been removed from the revolt action of Turbo Overkill, the act of inspiration from eternity. As Prebble said, the only thing that the two projects had in common was the first person’s viewpoint. Even so, he found himself returning to Total Chaos after the end of the development on Turbo Overkill, resulting in an independent remake.

As the name Wadaholic suggested, Total Chaos was not the first Mod of Prebble, but eventually it became the most resonant to the audience. “It was trapped around for a while,” he said. “Like, I didn’t release it and it died on the spot, like some things I have released in the past. I feel like: I can do better if I switch to a more normal game tool.”

Prebble’s interest in survival horror begins through osmosis. “It is funny,” he said, “Because I have received a lot of inspiration from, clear, silent hill games while I am developing the mod, and those effects are definitely trapped with the redo. But the funny thing is that I have never played Silent Hill.

However, he loves the atmosphere of the games with “lower graphics honesty” like Let’s Plays of Cry of Fear, he will see endlessly. Initially, he began to be completely rebellious in Unreal, but turned to unity after finding too high honesty. “And after that, you know, try to create a full 10 to 12 -hour game with that loyalty will be too many tasks for a person.”

To help bring a taste of the MOD’s Lo-Fi atmosphere into the new project, Prebble said he was working to implement the optional retro mode. “Super low resolution, Chunky structure and Chunky, Chunky model.”

On the other hand, he said that the biggest challenge of modifying the mod is to have the right balance – want to update everything for the new object without going too far away from the spirit of the original. “I don’t want to try and go too far in one direction and change what everyone loves about the mod,” he explained. During the early access stage of Turbo Overkill, many features he put in just to temporarily supplement. But when he went to change, he saw the player developed with those who kept his place. At the same time, he is trying to remember a new object, “So you have to try to take some jokes and make it play a little better.”

“The best example I can think of is something basic like the player’s motion,” Prebble said. “The mod is very slow.

He said now his approach is “basically just feel”. He plans to give a demo for Total Chaos earlier this year, but it will not have time to access early as Turbo Overkill. Instead, he learned to rely on more tests. “It’s easy to be caught and trapped in that development cycle: You are looking at a game every day and you don’t know how it will look for a person who is dancing in a fresh, right?”

Something remains most of this new version: a abandoned colony and the surrounding Isle is affected by Japanese warships. “The story in the mod is basically combined, I think, the month of development,” Prebble said. There will be new discoveries to perform this time, but the story is mostly the same. “Mostly still, you are fighting through this island and you are connecting a story when you go.”

“At first I will have the whole island connected,” he said. “I want everything to become seamless. But the more I work with it, the more I realize that it is a meaningless effort. In the mod, you have never returned to the areas you have discovered before.

Instead, he focused on the familiar adjustment. “You will go to a level – if you have played the previous mod – and like: ‘Okay, I remember this space.’ But the more you play through the level, the more you start to realize: ‘Okay, this is different.’ And finally, you are only thrown into a completely new area without you know. “

Many like I like the idea set out to create a survival horror game without too much experience in this genre, not only because this can be isolated from some more familiar tropical regions, Prebble has now spent some time to get used to the touches he missed, like Silent Hill 2 Remake and Resident Evil. For what he feels that makes a great horror game survival, all fall into the atmosphere.

“What I love is that you don’t need to have a highly honest game, you know, all these crazy display technologies to create something in the atmosphere. You can create something just naked.

“That, and try to make the player feel helpless. You see that design everywhere. You have a very limited arsenal. You have a very limited movement. I feel like these two are the most important things for me.”

The demo of the steam for Total chaos is “very brief”.