Homebrew Build Artifacts - Playstation 1 narrative mystery

[perrinface]

I made a PS1 game for the Ludum Dare game jam last weekend. It's mostly a fairly simple narrative thing set inside a fake UI, but I think it came out fairly well for a weekend project.

Build Artifacts is a sci-fi narrative mystery for Playstation 1
You are the last operator on space station orbiting a dead world. You have the solemn duty to scan this planet for artifacts to learn what happened to this people in the hope it can save your own.
https://lockeddoorpuzzle.itch.io/build-artifacts

 

[Megarockman _1987 Megarockman _1987]

I made a PS1 game for the Ludum Dare game jam last weekend. It's mostly a fairly simple narrative thing set inside a fake UI, but I think it came out fairly well for a weekend project.

Build Artifacts is a sci-fi narrative mystery for Playstation 1
You are the last operator on space station orbiting a dead world. You have the solemn duty to scan this planet for artifacts to learn what happened to this people in the hope it can save your own.
https://lockeddoorpuzzle.itch.io/build-artifacts

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Wow, looks very interesting
I'll check it out

 

[cornpops]

I am immediately interested in your build process. Is there a mature homebrew toolchain? Was an offical SDK released or leaked?

This is going straight onto the deck, brb.

Post automatically merged: Apr 24, 2026

The joke is biological warfare.

Post automatically merged: Apr 24, 2026

Not to triple-stamp the thread, but I am hampered by the limitations that are built in.

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@perrinface So, I played it. This is a very appealing aesthetic and design to me. I previously made something with a monitor frame -- it is a good vibe, leans towards the diagetic. The game ran and controlled pleasantly enough; though there is a breakpoint after the first 'artifact' which can catch a player in a loop (and keep them stuck for lack of feedback) until they realize that the globe can, in fact, have multiple points.

Cognitive aliasing. My first two points were relatively close together and it wasn't apparent that the signal-strength tracker was tracking a second point rather than the first. That was a good five or so minutes of going back and forth and trying every button in every screen.​

The drone looks a lot like the Heretic from Privateer 2. I know it's from Psionic's model pack, but it's an unmistakable design.

Nice gamefeel, neat vibes -- a mix of Mass Effect 2's probe dropping and Star Control's lander game, plus the mandatory email drip.

Recommended parings: Starcom (series), The Forever War.

 

[perrinface]

Thanks for checking the game out.

I am immediately interested in your build process. Is there a mature homebrew toolchain? Was an offical SDK released or leaked?

I'm using an approach which has fallen out of favor in the PSX Homebrew community, I'm using a toolchain called PSYQ+Nugget which is Sony's official C SDK libraries ported to work with modern compilers.

The current community preference is psyqo which is a C++ SDK written without the official libraries but it's not to my dev tastes for a bunch of reasons.

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@perrinface So, I played it. This is a very appealing aesthetic and design to me. I previously made something with a monitor frame -- it is a good vibe, leans towards the diagetic. The game ran and controlled pleasantly enough; though there is a breakpoint after the first 'artifact' which can catch a player in a loop (and keep them stuck for lack of feedback) until they realize that the globe can, in fact, have multiple points.

Cognitive aliasing. My first two points were relatively close together and it wasn't apparent that the signal-strength tracker was tracking a second point rather than the first. That was a good five or so minutes of going back and forth and trying every button in every screen.​

I did try to make sure the points where spread out so you didn't get them on top of each other but perhaps I need to spread them out a bit more. To some degree I don't mind there being a fit of friction here, I chose not to tutorialise anything because the "game" part of the experience is really just figuring out how everything works.

The drone looks a lot like the Heretic from Privateer 2. I know it's from Psionic's model pack, but it's an unmistakable design.
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That's interesting, it's been a long time since I played Pirvateer 2 so I didn't recognise it. Obviously I was just using free assets from itch.io but you're right that's clearly the inspiration

Nice gamefeel, neat vibes -- a mix of Mass Effect 2's probe dropping and Star Control's lander game, plus the mandatory email drip.

Thanks, yeah I'm interested in exploring more of these fake OS / UI style games and I figured Ludum Dare was good chance to make something small in that genre to try it out.

 

[SamanthaSamantha's icon]

That's awesome, dude!

 

[cornpops]

I did try to make sure the points where spread out so you didn't get them on top of each other but perhaps I need to spread them out a bit more.

I wouldn't go that far. They seem randomly assigned anyways.

Good lesson for the next project. Certainly never tutorialize more than you need to, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't display a challenge -- which can serve as tutorial, hint, and progression indicator all in one.

A thought might be to add more gak to the globe -- like a list. It offers more visual juice, a little clutter, and you can drop that hint with a little "searching..." text. Once the player clocks that it's a list they'll implicitly understand there's more than one entry.

I'll mock something up:

Also, you already have directional helpers in the probe screen. You could add a similar element in the scan screen -- there's already a live hot-cold indicator, and if players are scanning in zones which are not full-strength then they've already failed the task anyways. You could just put a little caret (< >) in the direction they need to go and help them along -- they already get the hint magnitude in real time.

To explain myself a bit better, a User Story:

I successfully scanned the first artifact and left the Scan screen to read the new emails and decode the data packet. That took a few minutes. I returned to the Scan screen having run out of novel things to look at in the other screens. I spun the globe around trying to find a new signal and noticed that the sensor strength went up as I approached the first artifact. Not knowing if I was scanning any artifact (including the first artifact) or the "next" artifact (I did not know if there was a next artifact), I perform a scan directly on top of the first artifact. I am told that nothing was found.

Actually, I just booted it up again to validate that story and, indeed, the Scan screen dropped me straight on top of the first artifact without needing to move the globe. I scanned that, did the first probe, and then went back into the Scan screen. Sure enough, full bars and nothing found. So, it is tracking any artifact.

So, that might be the fix right there: Limit the signal strength to only the next artifact.

Small programatic, solves probably the only real hangup. Everything else is plainly intuitive.