Game Development and BETA builds - Informative sources about game dev and beta versions

[Kuchipatchi]

I've been watching some videos about beta versions of games and some indie game dev logs and I've noticed an absence of talks about game Dev on this site so I thought I'd fill the gap.

The game dev vlogs that I've been watching is for an indie project called Demonlock because he gives an insight on the game's code, the design choices and some advice for aspiring devs.

I'm currently watching (as of writing this) a series of video about the Orcarina of Time beta info that came from the Giga Leak. This one guy has done a lot of videos about the leak specifically about OoT with a couple other games sprinkled in.

And I saw the Yoshi's Island beta (though seems more like an alpha build) and feels weird seeing it use SMW sounds (I guess it uses the same engine as SMW).

If you know any interesting videos, channels or articles about game betas or development, feel free to use this thread to share content.

 

[Coffee Shits]

A lot of stuff in games "cut" from betas end up still being there on the disc/cartridge, just made inaccessible by normal means. I would recommend searching your favorite game on The Cutting Room Floor wiki.

A lot of games have hidden developer text, usually comments or technical info for how the game runs, but sometimes they're outright rants by a disgrunted developer that gives you an interesting insight into the development process.

 

[Kuchipatchi]

A lot of games have hidden developer text, usually comments or technical info for how the game runs, but sometimes they're outright rants by a disgrunted developer that gives you an interesting insight

Oh yeah! I remember the Tetris rant when a guy made a list of stuff he hates, game development must be one hard job with this many rants in games but that makes me appreciate games a bit more.

 

[Just wandering]

Oh yeah! I remember the Tetris rant when a guy made a list of stuff he hates, game development must be one hard job with this many rants in games but that makes me appreciate games a bit more.

I rememebr mostly the slutty hidden message in super monkey daibuken

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Unreal 1 is one of my favorite because there's builds stretching from shortly before release in 1998 all the way back to tech demos from 1995.

Here's a video from the 1995 build. Look at that lighting! It's all in software as well. (timestamped @59 seconds)

It still runs on Windows 10 so just google Unreal95 and download it, it's 3MB. The weird texture sampling is a wonderful thing to see, it gets crushed by Youtube compression.

 

[Blamo]

Unreal 1 is one of my favorite because there's builds stretching from shortly before release in 1998 all the way back to tech demos from 1995.

Here's a video from the 1995 build. Look at that lighting! It's all in software as well. (timestamped @59 seconds)

It still runs on Windows 10 so just google Unreal95 and download it, it's 3MB. The weird texture sampling is a wonderful thing to see, it gets crushed by Youtube compression.

That's really impressive for 1995.

 

[Kuchipatchi]

Unreal 1 is one of my favorite because there's builds stretching from shortly before release in 1998 all the way back to tech demos from 1995.

Here's a video from the 1995 build. Look at that lighting! It's all in software as well. (timestamped @59 seconds)

It still runs on Windows 10 so just google Unreal95 and download it, it's 3MB. The weird texture sampling is a wonderful thing to see, it gets crushed by Youtube compression.

If I had to guess what year that was made, I'd say late 90s rather than mid. It looks like a PS2 game demo (in a good way). I'll never fully appreciate how technologically advanced it is cuz I was born too late.

And that 90s track is proper awesome! There's something charming about tech demo music. Another track that comes to mind is Sonic Xtreme's Space Queen.

And I saw this the other night, enjoy cursed Moomin Bowser.

 

[Duncan Hills Coffee]

I grew up playing a game called SpongeBob: SuperSponge. It's an average 2D platformer, not terrible but certainly not great either. The soundtrack is a different story in that it's way better than it has any right to be. The game has some of my favorite tracks ever composed for the PS1, some of it's nostalgia obviously, but the OST is shockingly underrated. The game's disc contains a number of unused and beta tracks, with some of these being better than the official release.

For instance, this is the theme song of the release version.

I like this song, have tons of nostalgia for it, but it's also weird that it isn't the classic SpongeBob theme. Well as it turns out, the beta version was supposed to sound like the show's theme.

The options track is mostly the same, but the big difference is the unreleased version has a flute while the released version has a synth replacement. I'm assuming the flute was the issue here given that PS1 games used synthesized music most of the time.

The credits song is like an amalgamation of both of these; the beta track has moments that sound like the show's theme and has a flute (as well as more instrumentation in general), both of which are absent from the official game.

Lots of autism for a forgotten children's game, but with how much I played it as a kid it's interesting to me.

(Fun fact, the composer for the game, Matt Simmonds, had previously composed the music for the Amiga version of X-Com: Enemy Unknown)

 

[Antarctic Hellbeast]

The Half life 2 beta/leak is the only video game to ever give me existential Dread over the Combine Guard gun. Its basically a portable strider cannon.

The community of the Beta project apparently got infiltrated by troons some time between 2017-2019 and ever since that community has been pretty autistic and threadworthy behind the scenes.

Though some new gems were unearthed buried in the leak's files like some previously undiscovered npcs like the "Sentient" particle storms.

IIRC this feature was recycled with Hunters since they are programmed to instantly die when hit by a gravity gun thrown physics object in Episode 2:

The Combine guard is another cut NPC that is probably a remnant of the goldsrc/HL1 era of HL2's development that is referenced multiple times in the game files with similar file extensions only used in that engine.

And no one ever mentioned that the PC stress test for CounterStrike: Source is a blank copy of a cut HL2 map:
The Hydra was cut because according to its creator it was "not fun to fight and normally most players would see an indiscriminate blob doing something and then be instant killed" (aka Half Life 2 era valve was worried about DSP and those like him even before his Streaming Debut. )

Probably also why the Jetski was cut due to causing test players "motion sickness"

 

[Titos]

Check out PtoPOnline, his entire channel is basically beta, cut, or cancelled stuff from games.

 

[Dysnomia]

I've been watching some videos about beta versions of games and some indie game dev logs and I've noticed an absence of talks about game Dev on this site so I thought I'd fill the gap.

The game dev vlogs that I've been watching is for an indie project called Demonlock because he gives an insight on the game's code, the design choices and some advice for aspiring devs.

I'm currently watching (as of writing this) a series of video about the Orcarina of Time beta info that came from the Giga Leak. This one guy has done a lot of videos about the leak specifically about OoT with a couple other games sprinkled in.

And I saw the Yoshi's Island beta (though seems more like an alpha build) and feels weird seeing it use SMW sounds (I guess it uses the same engine as SMW).

If you know any interesting videos, channels or articles about game betas or development, feel free to use this thread to share content.

The stage 2 Hyrule Field is exhausting to run through. I'm glad they changed it. Not being finished probably led to some of the unfriendliness of it. But it never seems to end. Epona would be a necessity there had they kept it. Overall there's some neat things there. But what we got was far friendlier.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

If I had to guess what year that was made, I'd say late 90s rather than mid. It looks like a PS2 game demo (in a good way). I'll never fully appreciate how technologically advanced it is cuz I was born too late.

And that 90s track is proper awesome! There's something charming about tech demo music. Another track that comes to mind is Sonic Xtreme's Space Queen.

And I saw this the other night, enjoy cursed Moomin Bowser.

Unreal 1 had a bunch of advanced stuff that never saw any real use or was patched out. It had actual working portals, the kind you see in Portal and Prey just not as advanced. What's even more impressive is that they also work using software rendering which was not true for original Prey. It got implemented because Prey and its engine was seen as a potential threat to their future engine licensing business, Epic had planned to get into that and compete with id software(who also implemented portals, sort of, in the Quake 3 engine for the same reason as Epic).

 

[Antarctic Hellbeast]

Unreal 1 had a bunch of advanced stuff that never saw any real use or was patched out. It had actual working portals, the kind you see in Portal and Prey just not as advanced. What's even more impressive is that they also work using software rendering which was not true for original Prey. It got implemented because Prey and its engine was seen as a potential threat to their future engine licensing business, Epic had planned to get into that and compete with id software(who also implemented portals, sort of, in the Quake 3 engine for the same reason as Epic).

Man I just want to see that cool red dragon be restored in gameplay that was in some of the very early builds.


Found this Unreal engine 2 tech demo. Predates GOW by a few years.

Prototype locust emblem 0:30 and Gears did not release until 06 on UDK/UE3.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Found this Unreal engine 2 tech demo. Predates GOW by a few years.

Prototype locust emblem 0:30 and Gears did not release until 06 on UDK/UE3.

I remember watching that when it was released and it was awesome. Face animation was in dire need and "Seamless indoor and terrain" sounds like it's no big deal, but it was at the time. Quake 3 Team Arena released a couple of months later and it had the terrain feature. It was not that height mapped terrain was hard to render efficiently, it's actually pretty simple, but indoor environments are not height mapped, they were BSP at the time, so those parts are processed in an entirely different way. Combining those two, putting a complex "indoor" environment in a landscape, created challenges.

Unreal 2 also had a beta that was leaked that looked much better than the released version.

 

[Milwaukee Macho Man]

I don't know if it fits, but Triangle City posted this today and I thought of this thread. He does a lot of New Vegas cut content videos (I think over 60 at this point)

 

[AsbestosFlaygon]

I hate Liam Robertson for being a total political sperg on Twitter, but I have to admit I really like the videos he does, the only thing on DYKG worth a damn.

Probably the one I remember finding the most interesting since he moved to DYKG, but he's covered all sorts of shit. Most recent on was about him documenting and finding the WorkBoy, which I thought was incredibly interesting as well. Also did a bunch of videos on his personal account for Unseen 64, most notable one being his Project H.A.M.M.E.R videos, which revealed how much of a shitshow that title was behind the scenes. I also like pretty much all of his Factor 5 videos for the same reason, on top of showing a ton of real interesting games

Link to Project Hammer videos
Link to Factor 5 videos

 

[Milwaukee Macho Man]

This guy does Deep Dives into Skyrim and Oblivion cut content. He's mostly focused on Skyrim up until recently so there's more videos on that right now.

 

[ZMOT]

That's really impressive for 1995.

there was also powervr (I think) renderer for dynamic shadows as well.

Unreal 1 had a bunch of advanced stuff that never saw any real use or was patched out. It had actual working portals, the kind you see in Portal and Prey just not as advanced. What's even more impressive is that they also work using software rendering which was not true for original Prey. It got implemented because Prey and its engine was seen as a potential threat to their future engine licensing business, Epic had planned to get into that and compete with id software(who also implemented portals, sort of, in the Quake 3 engine for the same reason as Epic).

unreal tournament had spatial distortion, I still remember playing a beta on a lan and the towers in facing worlds had elevators which were like 3m high but went all the way up. for release they had replaced it with teleporters I think. never found any footage about it sadly.