Development:Psychonauts

This page details development materials of Psychonauts.

This article is a work in progress. ...Well, all the articles here are, in a way. But this one moreso, and the article may contain incomplete information and editor's notes.

To do: Everything. There is so much to dig through here, especially the scripts.

In February 2013, Double Fine pushed a build to Steam that included a significant amount of development files by accident. Specifically, they mistakenly included the full, original contents of the texture and script folders of the game.

These folders contain a huge amount of content and are a treasure trove of information. The texture folder has things such as Photoshop texture sources, original uncompressed TGAs and in-dev textures that didn't ship with the game and the scripts folder contains the full, uncompiled Lua source code of every script in the game, which is pretty significant considering pretty much everything in the game was scripted with Lua.

Subpages

Scripts All the game's Lua files, laid bare. Since most of the actual game itself was programmed in Lua, this might as well be complete source code for the actual game part of the game.

Documents

Included in this build is a collection of development documents from various periods of development including design documents, planning sheets and early playtest guides. They help to paint a clearer picture of Double Fine's ambitious plans and how the game changed over the course of development.

Li-Po Character Backstories

A document titled "Li-Po Character Backstories" (though also known as "Character Backstories.doc" and widely as "The Li-Po Backstory Document") can be found in the "GlobalSystems" folder. This file is fairly well known in the game's community and was for some time one of the only files from this build that had been saved before its rediscovery. Contained within are writeups detailing prospective backstories for most of the characters in the game written by Tim Schafer. The document makes it clear that most of this information was not necessarily intended to appear ingame (and, likely, never intended to be solid canon) and existed mainly as a reference when writing for the characters. Some of the information, particularly that on characters that return in the following games, has been contradicted though some of it does still seem to to hold up - Boyd, for example, has the backstory written for him here heavily referenced in the game even if it would be impossible to piece together the full picture just from what's given in the game.

Textures

On top of including uncompressed TGA versions of pretty much every texture in the game, this build contains various Photoshop sources, textures only seen in pre-rendered FMVs, as well as textures that weren't used in the final game at all.

UI

Menu backgrounds

A few images that were apparently used as menu backgrounds at some point are lying around.

MenuBackground

Present in the "MenuUI" folder is this background for an early iteration of the menu. Rather humorously, this render was clearly created when D'Artagnan was still the protagonist and then altered to have a picture of Raz taped over Dart.

E3 logo backgrounds

The same folder also contains a couple of variations on the Psychonauts logo seen at E3 2002, ostensibly also used as menu backgrounds at some point.

MainMenuBackground	E3psychonautLOGO

Ancient logo

A mysterious and previously unseen logo for the game, stored in the UI folder.

HUD icons and textures

Early PSI-Challenge marker symbol

An early PSI-Challenge Marker symbol. It can be seen in use in the E3 2002 trailer.

"Mood" Health Bar

Early in development, the player's (at this point, D'Artagnan) health was represented in-universe as "mood" rather than literal mental health, using a health bar designed to look like a sliding scale. Taking damage was represented as your mood going down and healing was represented by it going up. Consequently, this resulted in experimentation with a mechanic where happy things (such as the flowers in Gloria's Theatre) could heal you. This system was likely devised as a result of Gloria's Theatre, where mood is a central theme, being the first playable level for the game.

Unfortunately, all the internal engine functions used to manage this system have been dummied out. The Lua function to adjust the player's mood does nothing, and the one to get it will always return 0. All that remains are the above components used for the HUD and a few calls to the aforementioned functions found in older scripts.

Since the health bar is composed of different pieces, it's hard to determine how it would have looked ingame, however, pre-release footage shows a test implementation where the bar is tilting back and forth, with a small D'Artagnan head sliding along it, so it's possible the bar visually worked like a set of scales, tilting in either direction depending on your health. A rough mockup of what it possibly looks like when assembled is provided, but it is purely speculative:

Early Health Bar

Another old iteration of the health display. This variation can be seen in some pre-release screenshots.

Global

Emotional Roadblock

A folder for the cut "Emotional Roadblock" NPC can be found in the files, containing these textures. Despite the main texture already having barbed wire present, the second texture is named "barbwiretest". Since it's seemingly just a UV map, it's unclear what it would have been for. No model publicly exists to match these textures, though an official render of this scrapped enemy does exist:

Asylum

Milkman Ghosts

While not technically unused, these ghostly figures used to represent the milkman persona leaving Boyd are only ever seen in a pre-rendered cutscene.

Campgrounds

Camp Bus

Textures for the camp bus. This bus is only seen in the pre-rendered ending cutscene and never elsewhere, so these textures are nowhere to be found in gameplay. Notably, certain parts of the texture still have the UVs overlaid since they're never seen. Not being intended to be shipped with the game, they're quite large.

Jet

The texture for the Psychonauts' jet. Much like the bus above, this vehicle is only ever seen in the ending cutscene so these go unused. Also like the bus, UV overlays can be seen and the textures are very large.

Gloria's Theater

To do: Upload some highlights?

Tons of textures from an earlier iteration of Gloria's Theater can be found dumped in the root of the folder. This is because it was the first playable level created for the game and as such many of its assets weren't organised into a folder. The same trend can be seen with the scripts folder.

Miscellaneous

DartClimb

A side view cutout of Raz climbing something. No idea what it could have been for.

Spinach

A bizarre series of textures named "spinach" featuring Eric Cartman and the text "BEEFCAKE 2000 !!!" can be found in the root of the textures folder. It comes in 3 variations:

spinach.tga	Heightfield	spinach_rip.tga

It's anyone's guess what these could have been for, though their presence in the root of the folder may suggest a link with Gloria's Theater, but there's no way to confirm this.