Palmsai Pictures

Dead Terminal

A short indie-game for the DreadXP End of Summer Bone Jam 2023, which won 1st place.

This little project is a 1st person investigation/FPS game where you search around an old building located in a remote town which is gradually being taken over by technology of a sinister nature. It is your task to solve the mystery around a murder in its haunted rooms; you speak to robotic units which have inherited the personalities of once living humans, and detect and repel ghosts that still linger here.

  • Lead Game Designer: & Programmer: Alex Olinkiewicz
  • Graphics Artist and SFX: Daniël van Asdonck
  • 3D Robot Model: Angry Armadillo
  • Game Writer: Amy Lynch
  • Music Composer: TurtleBox
  • Voice Lines: Petra Zegnal

The idea was that the player/detective arrives at a distant town in a snowy environment, where the technology seems to spread over everything, almost by itself, enveloping buildings, appliances and even humans.

A couple first sketches for the design of the building where the game takes place. Ideas revolved around a retro futuristic or brutalist type of architecture. Eventually we decided to go with a rather normal late late 20th century apartment building, with the emphasis on the technology that is taking over every day life.

When entering the main building, the player is confronted by a poster advertising a service which claims to preserve the human mind in new robotic units. Though the small print hints toward a problem: the unit is merely a copy, and does not integrate the original soul.

The style is designed to lean towards a retro feel and along with the text attempt to instil a sense of hope and comfort into potential customers (inspiration for the face came from a music video clip of the Italo Disco duo ‘Righeira,’ of the song ‘No Tengo Dinero’). The message and the unsettling small print give a first hint to the dark content of the game’s story. My colleague Alex came up with the acronym B.O.N.E. for the robotic units, as a wink to the name of the Bone Game Jam.

The Dead Terminal trailer:

The end result of this service is immediately presented once the player moves to the next room. B.O.N.E. units displaying the faces of the people they are supposed to replace stand there, awaiting to comply with your investigation.

Each of the two units present on the base floor had to be provided with their own faces, for which I made a set of expressions. First was one of the tenants.
The second was the landlord. I decided to go with a dark and grimy style to fit in with the atmosphere and theme of the game, giving them deep shadows and features that are not too attractive.

Another part of the game consists of hunting ghosts and piecing together recorded audio lines. For this I designed both a male and female ghost, both with strange holes in their bodies. These are supposed to hint towards parts where cybernetic enhancements and augmentations were once implemented during their lives; now absent in their spectral forms. As you roam through the dark abandoned rooms, you can still hear their cries, lamenting how they have been replaced by robotic imitations of themselves.

Some robotic units have been corrupted, displaying this face on their monitors. The visuals are those of a broken LED monitor, with two eyes peering through the distortion.

The game can be downloaded from the itch.io page right here if you are interested: https://olinkalex.itch.io/dead-terminal-prototype-demo