Test 3rd Person Demo

Test 3rd Person Demo is a Nintendo 64 homebrew game by Team Ultranauts and released on 13 December 2020 for the 64brew game jam 2020. In it,you play as a robot who explores a mysterious area.

You can download the ROM and source code from the download page for this homebrew game by using the password 3dUltranauts or see the source code here and download from Drive.

Test 3rd Person Demo style and gameplay

As the name implies, this is an incomplete game. It’s pretty much just a game engine working in a sample area with no real objective or challenge other than exploration. The best way I can describe it is that there are three areas: A spaceship, a tunnel and a stream area.

There isn’t really much to the game besides this. There are two caves in the stream area that glitch the game once you enter them (well, not really a glitch, but you can run out of bounds), so there’s not much you can do besides walking around these three areas.

There’s on thing you can interact with though. If you press the Z-trigger, you shoot a laser shot, which doesn’t really do anything. That is, until you approach this one bush, after which it becomes targeted and you can shoot it. It gets destroyed after a few shots but nothing comes of it.

After destroying the shrub, it remains targeted in perpetuity, and your shots aim towards it (and beyond) wherever you are in the map.

‘Size’ theme

The size theme isn’t present in the submitted version of the game. The developers have said that they originally planned to make it so that the robot could hack into other robots or change size in order to adapt to different challenges.

On top of that, enemies would have different sizes and would provide different levels of spoils upon defeating them.

Credits

The game was developed by Team Ultranauts, which consists of WadeMalone and Geist. WadeMalone took care of the main engine, and Geist added in some improvements and QC.

Conclusion and review

When I saw this game on the list of submitted entries to the game jam, I didn’t really have high expectations. I thought it would just be some sample engine with nothing more, but it did leave me pleasantly surprised.

While there is no challenge or objective per se, I think that Test 3rd Person Demo serves more as a scenery viewer or an explorable interactive 3D model. It won’t give you much to do, so you just have to take it for what it’s worth and enjoy spending a few minutes enjoying the view.

Speaking of the view, it is marvelous. This looks like the kind of graphics and animation that you’d come to expect from a retail N64 game so Team Ultranauts is definitely on the right path to making a great game for everyone to enjoy, it’s just a shame that there was a deadline and they were too short on time to release a finished game.