What was Arms Race, anyway?

Arms Race (the title was always a tongue-in-cheek pun and never got finalized) started life as a bullet-hell shooter I conceptualized in 2019, after playing entirely too much Phoenix 2 and deciding I wanted to make something like it. Except me being who I am, that’s not what it turned into at all.

I made a prototype very quickly in Godot, with the concept that your player character was a giant robot arm; instead of shooting back at enemies, you’d have a powerful melee attack that could rip turrets off opponents, and then shoot back at them with their own weapons. And then throw the turrets at them when you were done.

And then…something happened! Namely, I decided to write a story for it (still about a giant robot arm), as I do, and then somehow that story turned into a stage play, and then the pandemic of 2020 happened.

Since I couldn’t stage the play in real life (not that I ever could, probably - the list of required props was frankly impractical), and thinking of how I wanted to see more stage plays in VR from my day job…I decided then to stage the play in Unity. With embarrassingly little knowledge about how Unity worked.

Through the course of a few months, I picked up enough about Unity to produce the first scene of the play…as well as a bunch of other things. Blender, to create the models. FMOD, to produce the audio. Various tools for animations. I built a bunch of systems to make the play work, and built something kind of (very) janky, but pretty cool.

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But it was one scene, running for less than 2 minutes. The whole play was slated to be about 30 minutes. And because of a series of life changes, I ended up putting the whole thing away for about a year.

So, I’m going to say it outright: I’m not finishing the Unity version of the play. Just getting the first scene in taught me a lot, and frankly most of the remaining work is going to be lots and lots and lots of animating (considering the whole project was pretty much a glorified cutscene). I don’t consider it a film, in part because it’s staged like a play, in part because of the level of interactive camera control, but making it felt almost like one, with Unity’s timeline. And I’m not much of a video editor, nor do I have any mocap capabilities to make animating the acting any easier…so it felt like an endeavor that’d take up entirely too much of my time.

Still, there’s a lot I learned along the way, and the pieces, that first scene, the process up to this point – I wanted there to be something to show of this. So, I’m releasing it, kind of.

There are a few things that I plan on releasing to celebrate(?) the end of this project:

  1. A build of the whole thing, up to the point I stopped.
  2. A video of the completed scene, because it’s not exactly efficient to download a 100+mb Unity game just for a 2 minute scene
  3. Writings on the process, like this one. They’re mostly for self-reference in case I work with Unity again in the future, but who knows, they might be helpful.
  4. As much as I can, source code. (I did use a bunch of Unity Assets, both free and not free, so there’s a lot I can’t share, but I want to figure out what I can.)

The script remains unpublished, because I do wonder if I can polish it and maybe stage it at some point. I also might at some point pick up that original shooter concept again, maybe for a game jam or another. But for the time being, assume this project is done.

So, here we are. The ‘game’ is as advertised: a play of a single finished scene, less than 2 minutes long. It’s wholly unfinished; some of the animations don’t line up right, the sound timings haven’t been tweaked, the dialogue sounds haunt me. But it’s the result of my lack of budget and time, and pieces shaved down to what I thought most valuable. I hope you enjoy it.