Harold is a virus

Hey folks! Laura Cough, Internet Lizard’s Firstborn Daughter here, and welcome to your weekly-ish Automaton Lunch post, where I bring you random and obscure fun facts about Luke Vincent’s titles, from the Willful to Walk! I’m feeling a lot better today, I got treated for my injuries and I’m ready to write a new Lunch post!

I don’t quite remember what I had in mind for this week though, so let me just go check last weeks post…

…Prisoner #3774? Really, concussed me?? Fine, guess I’ll try my best…

Right, so Prisoner #3774 is a 2020 Jam Title that Luke Vincent made with a couple of other people. Only problem is that it’s, uh… not… great? The enemies are pretty janky and the gameplay isn’t particularly enjoyable. The site says that Luke didn’t do any of the programming here, which really sounds about right, Luke could never program any game worse than a 6/10. All jokes aside, though, ripping on this game wouldn’t be very fair, seeing as though it was made by three people in three days for a University game jam, and for what its worth, this game actually took the 3rd place spot! It also is one of Luke’s (and likely the other two team members’) earliest titles, and from what I can tell, it’s his first publicly available Unity game.
Even if the game overall isn’t much compared to Luke’s other titles, we can still dissect it to find some fun secrets!

The first fun fact we can see here can actually be found pretty easily, technically without even booting up the game.
And that’s the fact that the Prisoner character from this game…

…Is actually the same one we see in Harold’s Walk!

(Technically the other way around because this game came first but Walk is the more popular one so whatever whatever)

The implications for lore this has is honestly kind of wild, seeing as though the prisoner in this game is actually a notorious space criminal who escaped from a maximum security space prison… If the Harold virus was being tested on him, was he captured again? Was the Harold virus the thing that led to his capture? Is Harold’s Walk set in a universe where he didn’t escape, and being forced to test Harold was his punishment for trying to escape?? Harold has connections to the world of Automaton Lung, does that mean that this guy could have theoretically been involved in that game too??? How does the Cult of Behemoth tie into all of this????

Unfortunately, the implications for game dev this has is much more mundane – this character was reused to save time and effort. Still a pretty fun fact that a lot of people probably didn’t know, though.

Back on topic, if you do happen to play this game (which I honestly wouldn’t recommend unless you’re morbidly curious or morbidly bored), you’ll notice that the entire game is played through the perspective of security cameras (one positive thing I can say about this game is how cool that gimmick is).

You might go on to wonder if these are 3D camera perspectives, or 2D images with 3D characters overlayed on top of them – a common trick games will use to accomplish 3D-looking spaces while remaining light on processing power. Turns out, the entire game world is made up of several 3D models. The main prison floor is pictured below, but I assure you, there are several more – and they will be coming to Uma’s Dank Rave 2, whenever that releases.

This is a pretty short game, so unfortunately there’s not a lot to cover here… Some of the textures have transparency artifacts…

…But that’s not really anything special. Some of Poppy’s game’s assets have those as well.

Seeing as though I don’t really have much else to cover here, I’ll just leave you guys with this swimsuit poster that I actually thought was significant in my first playthrough… Turns out it’s just there to be funny, though.

Yeah, that’s it for today. Join me next week to see if we can make anything of the Harold’s Walk 3DS CIA.
Cough Out!