You can watch the project running on Xbox 360 hardware, on this YouTube video here.
A fun, short, and interesting project I thought would be valuable, or at least, interesting to share with the community. While I don’t think I can share the finished project legally (it requires a devkit/hard-modded Xbox 360 console), I have decided to show the process of how this works. Credit where credit is due, I would like to thank u/ToothlessFTW for the idea.
Firstly, technical details. How does it work?
As you can see in the video, this recreation runs under the Unity engine. The engine by itself has a locked resolution that can be rendered (it is locked at a 1280 x 720 picture no matter what), and since it is quite an outdated version, it lacks much of the visual upgrades added to the software over years.
I decided to recreate by myself the teaser so it is, in fact, rendered in real time. You might notice the performance is lacking in some regard, but it was never meant to be good. I tested post processing effects on it, so I’m sure that is the problem that causes FPS to suffer (I’ve compiled a different version without the post processing and it seems to work better.)
The post processing effects applied are SSAO, Depth of Field and Vignette (which were provided by the engine's standard assets).
Textures are set to the lowest possible, the shadows are disabled, and the Light Count is set to two (even though I preferred to bake the lighting).
The menus and language selection screens are handled by switch statements that have their integer modified depending on d-pad movement. (Left would subtract one, right would add one. Same with up and down.)
It might technically not be the correct way to implement it, but it was quick and effective, without a hit on performance.
Toggling the newsletter was as simple as an if statement that would set the function setActive to false or true depending on whether the Y button was pressed when the newsletter was shown.
The music is ripped from directly off of a YouTube video of the teaser. You might notice the footsteps in the audio are off-sync, and it does feel like a tricky/hacky way to get through it but I believe it does the work pretty damn well.
The character model was made with MakeHuman, and was just as easy as selecting the jeans and jacket the software already comes with. The wooden plank I ripped off of a website, as well.
The UI was modeled after various screenshots from YouTube videos. The original font I didn't own, so through the website whatthefont I searched for a font that was close enough, and then I searched for a free alternative to said font (crazy, I know).
The language selection screen is a little more tricky: it uses a script that contains an array for every single language available. An integer is then used alongside a switch statement to set the language across the game, and it is globally saved using the PlayerPrefs function.
The total size when compiled is around 280~ MB.
But the important question: why?
It doesn't get as simple as: I aspire to make games. I've been trying for as young as I can remember! I quit doing it a couple of years ago, and now, I'm getting back on my track. This was something to practice coding and a quick project. It took around 60~ish hours to complete, and an additional six or five where I was toying around, making it as close to the original as I could within the limited constraints of the Xbox 360's 512 MB of RAM.
This was NOT to say or prove I could do a faster, better work than Hasan and his team. I value their effort so much, and I hope that if they come across this, they understand that I'm not trying to sound like I'm better than them.
Here's a couple of screenshots more if some detail was to be missed thanks to the low quality YouTube video. (I'm sorry! I don't have a capture card. They're veeery expensive.)
Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoyed this as much as I enjoyed working on it!
This should be reposted from r/TheBlueBoxConspiracy, but the post hasn't been approved there yet. Have it first, I guess!
EDIT: added simple explanation of how languages work in-game.
