ranzware
“Coming off Turbo Overkill has been great,” Trigger Happy’s Sam Prebble tells me over call. “That game’s development… I mean, it worked out. But it was very messy because it was my first game and I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. So I found myself, when it came to pumping content out, I was like: oh, shit. This code base is fucking awful. Like, I can’t put stuff together easily. I’m running into bugs everywhere. But now shit just works!”
You might know Sam Prebble as Trigger Happy Interactive, the solo developer behind frenetic FPS Turbo Overkill. Before that he went by a different name, attached to a very different project. Total Chaos, first released in 2018 under the moniker Wadaholic, is a total conversion mod for Doom 2. With its focus on a thick survival horror atmosphere of tension and disempowerment, it’s about as far removed from Turbo Overkill’s manic, Doom Eternal-inspired action as a game can get. As Prebble puts it, the only thing the two projects have in common is the first person perspective. Even so, he found himself returning to Total Chaos after wrapping development on Turbo Overkill, resulting in the standalone remake.
As the name Wadaholic suggests, the original Toral Chaos wasn’t Prebble’s first Doom mod, but it ended up being the one that resonated most with an audience. “It stuck around for a while,” he says. “Like, I didn’t just release it and it kind of died on the spot, like some stuff that I had released in the past. I felt like: I could do a better job of this if I were to move to a more conventional game engine.”
Prebble’s interest in survival horror began through osmosis. “It’s kind of funny,” he says, “because I did get a lot of inspiration from, obviously, the Silent Hill games while I was developing the mod, and those influences have definitely stuck with the remake. But the funny thing is, I’ve never actually played Silent Hill. At the time of developing the mod, I never played Resident Evil either.”
Still, he loved the atmosphere of games with “lower graphical fidelity” like the Let’s Plays of Cry Of Fear he’d watch endlessly. He originally started the reimagined Total Chaos in Unreal, but moved on to Unity after finding the fidelity too high. “And the expectation following that, you know, trying to create a full 10 to 12 hour game with that fidelity was going to be far too much of a task for just one person.”
To help bring a taste of the mod’s lo-fi atmosphere into the new project, Prebble says he’s working on implementing an optional retro mode. “Super low-res, chunky textures and chunky, chunky models.”
Otherwise, he says the biggest challenge of adapting the mod has been getting the balance right – wanting to update things for a new audience without straying too far from the original’s spirit. “I don’t want to try and go too far in one direction and change what people loved about the mod,” he explains. During Turbo Overkill’s early access period, a lot of the features he’d included were just intended to be temporary additions. But as he went to make changes, he’d find players had grown attached to those placeholders. At the same time, he’s trying to keep a new audience in mind, “so you kind of have to try to take away some of the jank and make it play a bit nicer.”
“The best example I can think of is something as basic as player movement,” Prebble says. “The mod was very slow. There’s deceleration on the player speed, so if you stop running you don’t stop instantly. I took that out in the remake, because that was basically an engine limitation. But then I found in testing that the game was too easy. A lot of the quality of life things I put in were taking away from that whole tension of fighting monsters.”
He says now his approach is “basically just going off feel”. He’s planning on putting out a demo for Total Chaos early this year, but it won’t have an early access period like Turbo Overkill. Instead, he’s learned to rely on testing more. “It’s very easy to just get caught and stuck in that developer cycle of: you’re looking at a game every day, and you don’t know how it’s going to look for someone who’s jumping in fresh, right?”
Something that’s staying largely the same in this new version is the setting: an abandoned mining colony and the surrounding isle influenced by Japan’s Battleship Island. “The story in the mod was basically put together in the last, I think, month of development,” Prebble says. There’ll be new discoveries to make this time around, but the story is largely the same. “It’s mostly still, you’re fighting through this island, and you’re piecing together a story as you go.”
“Originally I was going to have the whole island connected,” he says. “I wanted to have the whole thing be seamless. But the more I worked on it, the more I realised that was kind of a pointless endeavor. In the mod, you never went back to areas you previously discovered. I felt tying the whole thing together would feel slow – you’d basically feel like you’re not making much progress.”
Instead, he’s focused on tweaking the familiar. “You’ll enter a level – if you played the mod before – and be 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 then eventually you’re just thrown into this in completely new area that you don’t know.”
As much as I like the idea of setting out to create a survival horror game without having too much experience in the genre, not least because of how this might insulate you from some of the more familiar tropes, Prebble’s now spent some of intervening time getting acquainted with the touchstones he’d missed, like the Silent Hill 2 remake and Resident Evil. As for what he feels makes a great survival horror game, it’s all down to atmosphere.
“The thing I love about it is you don’t have to have a high fidelity game that has, you know, all of this crazy rendering tech to make something atmospheric. You can make something just bare bones. The videos I see online of indie horror games, some of them might not look like much, but they just have this completely unsettling atmosphere.”
“That, and trying to make the player feel helpless. You see that design everywhere. You have a very limited arsenal. You have a very limited movement set. I feel like those two things alone are kind of the most important things to me.”
The Steam demo for Total Chaos is coming “very shortly.”
Kurt Indovina
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