HI-09 - Beta Content

Hey! Been a little bit!

So, I've been looking through a lot of much older assets that were made for HI-09. I've been working on this game for.. almost a year now, honestly! At the time, Shipwrecked had freshly released, and in February, HI-09 (at the time going under "Content Batch 1") was in Pre-Production!

The first, EVER concept for the project was one I had initially thought of for a continuation, known as "Project V". It would be a lot weirder stylized than Shipwrecked, going for a cheap PC style, and using only Red, Black and White for its color pallet. I was really into this style, but I literally did not know how to apply this to a gameplay concept? The concept would have you jumping the fence to a Studiogrounds lab at Vandal's instructions, but... why? It felt arbitrary and I didn't think it was gonna work out properly. Especially since I wanted to have enemies but.. Starlings would not make sense given the timeline placement.

I had also been working on a plot point at the time regarding Vandal being mistaken as a lot of early bigfoot encounters. This is still canon, but at the time, I was gonna go about it in a completely different way.

Later on, I began working on a much smaller concept (WHICH WAS EVEN SHORTER LIVED THAN THE LAST ONE SOMEHOW), simply called "Griever".

It would be a short (web-based) platformer, where you would play as Chelsie trying to climb up a hill to leave a tribute to Stumbler (this was before she was properly characterized, or the plot of the hotel stuff was fully planned out). It was kind of corny and just couldn't fit a vibe I wanted, so I stopped working on it kinda early (although you can see some of the style tests of a still alive Stumbler and an injured Chelsie)

Around this time as well, I had actually made a still-alive Chelsie model who had her eyes and everything!

(Thank you, March 2024-era Squeaks!)

Getting to the game itself, the plans were SUPER simple at the time. You would simply enter the building, and then try to solve some simple puzzles. The first name the project had was "Footage Finder", but after playing the new Bendy game (Secrets of the Machine), I decided a stylistic N64 escape room was the best way to go about it.

Few in-dev screenshots of the first version of the game:

    Early on, I wanted as somber an approach as possible. No characters, at ALL. This obviously is not the case anymore, but at the time I really wanted very little face-to-face interaction with anyone. The only real exceptions to this rule were R.exe. (I love him so much LMAO)

Here we have me creating the "Constance Cipher', not beta content, but still cool!

This is kind of an interesting one. I had an idea laid out ages ago for a fake video essay leading up to HI-09 releasing, almost describing the user's history with the site as it slowly seemingly built itself up around the person. This entire plot point was cut after a while, but there are still remnants of that left over.

Video thumbnail:

Various fake screenshots from the video:

Few more things

Originally, the actual REAL WORLD Hotel wasn't gonna have the 09 decal on top of it, but instead, it would have been an editing error taken seriously. I made a mockup of it a while ago but it would be a clip from a Studiogrounds job training video:

In addition, there was also an unused Husk model that was made before our latest revision. It's a lot closer to the old one, but just didn't look right at the time. Still cool though!

Anyways, I don't think I have much else to share? It's late as all hell and I'm gonna probably head to bed. Hope to share more progress updates soon though, doing my best as per usual. Thanks for the support on my goofy little project up to now!!