That beautiful intro going into the unfinished bedroom really gives you all you need to know about what happened to this project.  It’s like you hired the best interior decorators in the world, but the construction crew hasn’t even finished the base of the house.

This screams "Big idea, but no experience and/or skill to make it happen, but being too stubborn to scale it down, due to fear of dissapointment".

the music in the naming sequence unironically got me really emotional. this was a project i first saw in middle school and the fact after all that time, after all those years anticipation, this is all they have to show for it. I teared up a bit for all the wrong reasons

The intro is so sad knowing that Travis will never actually go to those many places.

The fact that we only got demos from 2022 and 2023 shows they deadass dont have ANY new content

It's quite sad really, decades of work just thrown out of the window, wouldn't be too surprised if Pastel leaked this build to have some excuse to rebrand or rework with a another engine or team

So the naming sequence was incredible. A beautiful piece of art for baming your characters, your favorite food, and hobby. All this awe is sucked out the window when I see the character fall into a doodle rendition of a bedroom, and I die of laughter. Winter 2014 can't come soon enough.

My experience playing Oddity is the AVGN's experience playing Alfredo or Alfred N The Fettuc:
"(black screen) ... What happened? Where's the fucking game?"

I like to cope and think there are parallel universes where pastel never became director and stayed as a writer and universes where the team gathered together to forcefully appoint a new director

The music piece, for anyone curious, that the character select screen plays, is an arrangement of “Out Of My Dreams, and Into Your Arms,” from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “Oklahoma.”

Can we just open source this and have the community get something out there

8:13 not gonna lie this music is gonna haunt me for a while anytime I hear it since it's connected to a game I had so much hope for 😭

(btw this track is so ass and it makes my pain worse)

ah, the earthbound special, development INFERNO

Meryl is SUCH a cute and silly little character i love her design so much... she cannot be trapped within this game forever i refuse

SOMEBODY OUT THERE PLEASE RESCUE THIS GAME 😭

I just know this game was amazing in the reality where it actually came out.

I’m surprised all of the talented and skilled people who worked on this game didn’t ban together to create their own fan Mother game away from Pastel, since he seemed to be the core reason the game failed and failed to launch.

7:15 the "state" and "ang" (angle) entity variables are pretty self-explanatory imo, but the "depth" variable is interesting. Basically, 2D games commonly implement some kind of depth-based draw sorting to give the world a 3D feel (the Player sprites can be drawn in front of or behind some other object in the world based on their relative positions, etc.) but in this demo they are dynamically updating the Player's depth as they move around which is not very common. Often a sprite's depth is a fixed value and the final draw order is determined by sprite origin y-value first and THEN their individual depth values to resolve ties or to assign a sprite to a specific layer that is always drawn in front of/behind other layers. Many engines do this out of the box now. The issue with Mother-like games is how the art style projects weird diagonal lines in the world that break up the traditional "grid" structure of 2D RPGs (think of the walls in any interior space in Earthbound, for example), meaning the devs need to account for sprite x AND y positions in order to dynamically sort them in some cases. I would guess this dynamic depth value is an attempt to manage that. I was briefly involved with the other Mother 4 fan project and they were dealing with similar issues.

7:29 If you pause on a frame where the enemy sprite's timers are 0 you can see "a_state" = "choose_next_anim" so those are animation controllers (a_seq appears to be the actual animation name) and I would guess that "b_state" refers to the enemy's battle state (probably attacking, hit, dead, etc.). Everything on screen has an "action" value of -1, so there is probably a global enum somewhere that maps battle actions to integers and -1 is something like "idle" or "wait." You can't demonstrate this 100% without seeing the source but it looks like entities in battle are either little monoliths or at least have lots of very tightly-coupled systems under the hood. It's small app design decisions like that which can make projects take a very long time to finish if you end up having to do large refactors and Oddity definitely has a history of that.

The person who ran this project ran it into the ground through a combination of alternately extremely controlling and entirely absent "management styles." It was the kiss of death from the beginning. It's just a shame that lots of extremely talented artists, musicians, designers, and coders wasted literal years on a ghost project. I mean, just like at this pixel art, the sound work, the battles, and especially that opening sequence. They really could have caught lightning in a bottle if they'd had a leader willing to see through a consistent vision. But if it was going to happen, it would've happened 10 years ago.

What happened when mismanagement along side with all artists, no programmer.