Demon Eyes

Posted: 28 Apr 2024

There’s an interesting fun fact about the Nightmares - the path to the texture for their eyes is FXTextures/censor_eyes/censor02. This might seem a bit odd given that we’ve established Censors don’t have eyes, especially since this texture is just the orange circle.

But if you’ve been following things or if you’ve paid attention to pre-release stuff, you might be able to tell what’s going on. These are censor eyes, but not for the censors we know and love today. No, these eyes come from these weird freaky censors from the early days of the game’s development. They can be seen in some early footage. Sadly, we don’t have their model. We do have their textures at least.

Another interesting thing - there’s 30 images in that folder. These eyes were intended to be animated at some point, and the Nightmares/Demons just use the second frame. Strange thing is - the animation isn’t even set up. The animation file only uses the first frame.

I actually can’t tell if these eyes are even animated in pre-release media but they do seem to look slightly different between screenshots so… maybe they were animated at some point? The framerate set in this file would also make it animate very slowly, though.

Here’s an example of what the demons would look like if they used animation on those eyes. I’ve set the framerate to 30FPS, but we have no way of knowing what the correct rate would be. Maybe 1FPS is correct. Still pretty neat though.

Just another weird quirk tying these demons back to the game’s earliest days of development. I’m glad they found a home in the final game after being so thoroughly axed, but it’ll always be a shame how slightly rushed their final implementation feels.

They appear in a single level twice, are pretty much unexplained outside of an optional secret room and dialogue from Ford, and don’t even get any unique music or anything, instead re-using the Den Mother’s combat music. I’d love to hear a dedicate fanmade combat track for ‘em.

Still, I am glad the work that went into them didn’t go to waste, because they have a pretty cool and terrifying design.