Terminus: A Brand New FPS For The 3DO, Voiced By Silent Hill's Lisa Garland

The 3DO is not done yet. Homebrew studio Retro Love Letter is putting the finishing touches to Terminus, a first-person shooter built for Panasonic's console, in which the player takes the role of a space pirate sent to investigate a distress beacon. Aboard the ship, the crew has been turned into monsters, a genre staple rarely explored on this particular machine.

The production carries an unexpected credit list for an amateur project. Thessaly Lerner, the voice of Lisa Garland in the original Silent Hill, contributes to the voice work, while Ed Wilson handles the soundtrack. Textures are hand-painted by a pixel artist, and weapons and objects were digitised from custom 3D-printed models, a method that directly echoes mid-1990s productions.

The engine was written specifically for the console, with no AI involved. The developer explicitly states that "no AI was used for the coding of this game" and builds on a sector-based architecture inspired by Killing Time, a 1995 3DO title. Rendering combines quad-based polygons and digitised assets, runs at roughly 30 frames per second on real hardware, supports both NTSC and PAL, and allows seamless traversal between maps.

The game is currently in testing, with a physical release planned. The studio publishes its work on its GitHub repository and documents its 3DO projects on its YouTube channel. Anyone tempted to have a go themselves will find trapexit's 3DO development kit, the one used for Terminus, complete with setup documentation and build examples.

Source: Time Extension

Image credit: “3DO-FZ1-Console-Set” by Evan-Amos, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (resized).