Hi! We are looking for a few key folks to help us get over the finish line with Chex Quest HD! For those not familiar with Chex Quest, it was a kid-friendly Doom total conversion created as cereal box pack-in 1996. I am one of the original developers of that game and I have revisited it off and on over the last 20 years to create new content for the fans. For the last two years I have headed up a project to build a remake in UE4 (www.facebook.com/ChexQuestHD). The scope of this project is very small. We are close to finishing and have just a few areas where we need some assistance. I will list the specific challenges left below. We are an all-volunteer team of ~25 developers. We have a huge range of experience levels among us from 20+ year industry veterans like myself to complete beginners and students. We’re doing this as a hobby, but steadily have accomplished quite a lot. All weapons, powerups, characters and GUIs are in and working. The five levels are all playable, if not completely beautified at this point. The game can be run through beginning to end with very few truely game-breaking bugs.
Where we need help:
- We are tracking approx. 200 bugs of which about 10 of those are “A” game-breakers. About half of all bugs are associated with placeholder art. The majority of programming bugs are related to weapon firing/reloading edge cases, AI/pathfinding, our configurable game settings screen and the save/load system. Anyone familiar with these types of systems could be a big help in trying to clean up and debug our code. BTW, we’re building this entirely in BPs.
- There is a large amount of level beautification to finish. Two levels are largely finished in terms of final level architecture, props and lighting. The other three vary in beautification from perhaps half done to barely started. These unbeautified levels are fully blocked out with BSP and playable. They are just awaiting final art. In most cases we even have modular wall, floor and ceiling assets to build out these levels. We just need help with the legwork of building out the architecture to match the BSP with those modular pieces then prop it out and light it.
- There are two cinematics being created in Sequencer to finish. The intro has been fully blocked out and mostly animated, but needs polish. The outro has not been started. We need help with in-editor shot blocking and animating characters in 3D Studio Max. The characters have all been created, rigged and set up with phonemes and expressions, but there is a lengthy list of animations (including lip-syncing to dialogue) that need to be completed. There are also some challenging visual effects for a few shots that need to be created.
- The AI is pretty basic, created with the most simplistic of blackboards/behavior trees. It can release as is, but we would love to improve it.
- We have a store page ready to go on Steam and have an alpha build there currently, but we are in need of a new point person to maintain that version.
Finally it is important to mention that I do in fact have a license to produce this remake in writing from General Mills, owner of the Chex trademark. The terms of the license state that the game must be provided free of charge, be appropriate for all ages and the use of the trademark remains consistent with the original 1996 release.
If you have some skills in the areas mentioned and are interested in volunteering some time to help get this game finished, please send me a PM.
Thanks,
Charles Jacobi