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When they switched the protagonist to Raz, they kept this art but humorously edited to feature a polaroid of Raz taped over Dart. This, we *do* have.

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The background being used here has some fun history. I've talked about it before, but I'll gladly do so again. Originally, this had been a render of D'Artagnan fighting some enemies in Gloria's Theatre. We don't have the original render, but it was based on this concept art.

Concept art of D'Artagnan fighting enemies in Gloria's Theatre.

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This one from the gallery is fun though! This is the debug level select screen. It's extremely difficult to make most of the entries out, but it starts with a couple entries prefixed "FRED". There's references to "FRED" all over the place in many of the game's scripts.

Another photograph of an early development build of Psychonauts being played.

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This one shows up in the actual article. It's clearly in the "Nightmare" level (which evolved into "Brain Tumbler Experiment") and it's on "build 0175". Too blurry to make much else out though.

A photo of a man in a paper bag mask holding a controller in front of a TV. On the TV is an indistinct screenshot of an early build of Psychonauts. The text "Li-Po Build 0175" is visible.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 22/04/2026

Apparently the Mojo Psychonauts screenshots page was broken at some point but is fixed now, which is great because it's a nice source of old P1 screenshots (all of which I have archived already and many of which are watermarked, but still!) "What’s that brain truck all about?!" That's Telekinesis!

The raw image file for the same brain tow truck icon.

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I didn't have time to comment on it when it was posted, but this concept art that was posted by DF on this site is quite interesting. Not sure I've seen it before?

Concept art of the Asylum Grounds from Psychonauts. It shows a very open area, with various parts labelled.

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Finally, you might've noticed that for being "enemies" they don't do damage. That's because they're using an old version of the health system from when Dart's health was still represented as his "mood" on a scale. The functions still exist for this but do nothing in the final game.

A function called checkForDamage which calls "AdjustPlayerMood" with the argument -0.05 when GetPlayerDist is less than 20. A comment next to it reads "kill this when we have real collision and damage"

The code that chooses the size hardcodes it based on the name of the entity. This is a pretty archaic way of doing things in this engine, and they would later introduce a system that would let them set variables on entities via Maya (apparently planned, but not yet done when this entity was made).

A code comment that reads "figure out which of the flowers I am ...and set my attributes accordingly. (this kind of stuff will be done better someday using editable attributes in Maya)"

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The smallest being the default is explicitly noted as being because it's the favourite of the code's author. The file isn't signed, so I can't say with any certainty who said author is, but my bet would probably be on this being an early bit of Schafer code.

A code comment reading "default to small because that's my favorite"

It's not entirely clear if this test enemy truly was at these scales or if something changed with the scale during development. If you're curious, here's how all 3 look relative to each other. I did try to record a video showing all 3 but they get stuck really often...

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 06/11/2025

"orbiting_enemy" is found among some of the oldest entities in the Psychonauts scripts we have. An early version of what'd become the thistles, the code predates a lot of the engine's later sensibilities. This basic fixup isn't perfect, but gives an idea of what it did. See below for more info.

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A lot of particle effects in Psychonauts have this "Start pasting PE Room output here." comment. I can only imagine "PE Room" (Particle Effect Room? Particle Edit Room?) was some kind of tool that'd let them easily put together particle effects. A bit of a shame we don't have whatever it is.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 20/08/2025

Oh hey! We actually have the file for this! I don't know if I've ever posted about it before but I thought it was really neat to see.

Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 23/06/2025

With some determination, I've managed to staple on support for loading textures from PNG, BMP and for some reason JPG files. TGA also works, though was technically already supported by the engine.

Raz standing in the main lodge. In place of the "READ" poster featuring Sasha is a tacky wordart poster displaying the text "THIS POSTER TEXTURE IS LOADED FROM A PNG" with the same render of Raz repeated 4 times.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 05/05/2025

I've been working on a small side project recently, unrelated to Psychonauts. However, it's really been selling me on the potential for using Godot as a frontend builder for tools. Better than WinForms/WPF by a long shot. Considering it for a potential GUI for Oatmeal.

A screenshot of an Unreal Engine 4 behaviour tree being displayed in Godot. The selected node is a sequence node. An information panel on the right shows the details of the decorators for the node. It has a BTDecorator_RandomChance with a chance of 65, a 1.0 cooldown, a BTDecorator_InRangeOfTarget with a MinRange of 800, MaxRange of 2000, the blackboard key Target and LowerPriority flow abort mode. The final 2 decorators are HasAttacked not being set and DEC_IsInJump_C being false.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 26/04/2025

Progress, continued. It's occurring to me that it's been a long time since I wrote a technical post on solving a new issue and this might be a good candidate for it.

Ford Cruller standing near his trailer. He has black patches on his legs and hand.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 25/04/2025

Believe it or not, this is what "progress" looks like when working on Astralathe.

A screenshot of Ford Cruller standing outside his trailer. The textures on his clothes, broom and hands are miscoloured and broken-looking.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 24/01/2025

multi_prim_test. This was a very early test level that I built while developing custom level support for Psychonauts last year. It originally started as just 2 differently textured platforms to test multi-primitive support in Oatmeal. This version was built on the 19th of April 2024.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 18/12/2024

Deadlock ended up being recorded as my most played Steam game of this year, but I know for sure that if had been launching Psychonauts through Steam while working on Astralathe and such, it would have certainly dethroned it. A shame, would have been fun to see it here.

The Steam Replay 2024 game card for Deadlock. It shows the game title along with the tagline "Jacob Lash is an asshole." The game had 24% of total playtime, 293 session played, a maximum 25 day streak and was first played this year.

The playtime graph shows some playtime in May followed by the highest point being in June. There is a dip for July and August before going back up for September and October. It dips again in November before rising to the second highest point in December.

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And that's all we need to do. If we implement those changes then both machines now always work, and show the expected portrait!

Raz standing near the cobweb loom. Ford is saying his line with the right portrait.

Raz standing near the PSI core collector. Ford is saying his line with the right portrait.

We can prove this is the issue - if we head to Ford's lab while in state 7 but before meeting up with Lili (i.e. when he's standing on the entrance platform to the obeervation area) and PSI blast the core machine while closer to him, he speaks!

Here's the code the PSI core collector uses to set up its own reaction table. Ignore the "DIALOG" comment - it's incorrect. This code is generally a lot nicer and more maintainable though, I like it. And you'll notice we have the owner override set here!

A screenshot of Visual Studio Code displaying Lua code. The code defines a `tPsiReactTable` and sets the `NewMoveMelee` field to play some dialogue. The comment erroneously reads "You break that equipment and I'll weave YOU into something useful. Like a rug!" with an owner override of "self.ford"

Let's check the Cobweb Loom's code. Action actors such as the loom use a shared system for reaction dialogue like this. Here's the cobweb loom's reaction table in all of its redundant glory.

A screenshot of Visual Studio Code displaying Lua code. The code defines two tables: punchedTableNinja and tPsiReactTable. The first table includes a line of dialogue with a comment reading: "DIALOGUE: You break that equipment and I'll weave YOU into something useful. Like a rug!" The second table maps various actions to the same dialogue line.

Furthermore, if you listen to the loom vs. the core collector, you can kind of tell that there's something different. The loom's dialogue seems to play in 2D whereas the dialogue when you hit the core collector seems to actually be coming from Ford. Hmmm...

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First off is that this is of course resolution agnostic. With or without the widescreen patch, this bug happens. It's not a display issue - there really is no dialogue icon being shown.

Raz punching the cobweb loom. The same dialogue is present, still missing an icon.

🧵 I was idly messing around in Psychonauts and managed to find a mildly interesting bug. In this case, I was messing around in Ford's lab and happened to bump the cobweb loom. I got a line from Ford but... his dialogue portrait isn't there.

Raz standing at the bottom of Ford's lab. The game is in widescreen. Dialogue with no portrait saying "You break that equipment and I'll WEAVE YOU into" is onscreen.

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Back to quality of life, I've decided just for fun to add full Discord rich presence support to the entire vanilla game. This was inspired by something I've been meaning to write a thread about but I digress. In the future, this'll be exposed to modders in some way.

Discord rich presence showing Basic Braining part 2

This one's back to being more developer oriented, but I've also merged in my reimplementations of the game's debug rendering features. This restores some features of the debug menu and grants modders access to debug rendering for the sake of... well, debugging.

Raz standing in an incomprehensible mess of debug info.

This version of Astralathe fixes that, patching the game so the game renders them to appropriately sized buffers for your resolution. You can even set a scaling factor that allows you to increase or decrease the size of said buffers (such as for performance reasons).

To start, I've finally gotten around to merging in my fix for the game's various effects being low resolution. If you never noticed, some effects like the PSI hand or entity fading were quite... crusty, because the game was rendering them to a 640x480 buffer.

Before we get to those though, the final tool in the F10 menu is the console. This is a window that lets you view the game's log output and even enter and execute any Lua code you wish. This is great for both developers and just messing around.

Also in the F10 menu you can find the shiny new in-game settings menu. I'll be deprecating the old settings tool eventually because this menu is just a lot better in every way. There's some spoilers for a few new features in this image...

The mod list. Astralathe has a fancy new in-game UI accessible via the F10 key and inside it you can find this menu, which lets you view and manage every mod you currently have installed. This has been a very long time coming, and I'm really proud of it. I've spent a while polishing it up.

The mod list UI showing some example mods.

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Oh actually there is one last thing I couldn't fit in. For some reason in this frame from Gloria's memory vault one of the hands has 4 fingers and the other has 5?? I don't really know what to make of this one. Gloria only has 4 fingers on each hand. Interpret this how you will.

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And then in December 2002 we have Augustus' concept art. Again, 5 fingers. It seems that after all the theory was correct. There is seemingly some cutoff point in 2002 where Double Fine decided that characters should have 5 fingers.

This @scottlava.bsky.social concept art for Lampita, with 5 fingers. Dated August 2002. Right between our previously established date of E3 2002 and May 2003. Just 3 months after E3 2002 we have a 5-fingered character design.

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Even his texture sheet still only has 4 fingers on it. So, which finger on his hand is the odd one out? His ring finger. His ring ringer is just mapped to the same part of the texture sheet as as his index finger. I can only conclude this was the finger that was added later.

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The answer is predictable. Of course, D'Artagnan had 4 fingers. Of course he did.

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And this *does* seem to have been some kind of explicit design choice made later on. If we review Raz's concept art we see 4 fingers there, too. So it was the original intent and for reasons currently unknown to us it was changed later on.

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If we jump ahead a bit and examine some materials from a press kit, images from which were uploaded by IGN some time around May 2003, we can see that Raz has grown an extra finger. So, some time between E3 2002 and May 2003, Raz's design was updated.

Screenshot of Raz in an early version of Milla's mind. He visibly has 5 fingers.

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You can also see this here and there in the E3 2002 trailer for the game so this 4-fingered design was definitely part of his model. Rather than show a blurry screencap from the trailer though here's an image showing some renders of his 2002 model at various angles. As you can see, 4 fingers.

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This is most prevalent in media from 2002. The clearest example is this key art which was included in the Xbox E3 2002 Media DVD. It's a posed render of Raz which very clearly shows his hands in all of their 4-finger glory.

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For now let's stick to the easy answer. If we look at Raz's hand in Psychonauts 1, we can easily count and see the the "true" answer is 5. Raz has 4 fingers and a thumb which, for our purposes, can just be counted as 5 fingers.

A screenshot of Raz's hand in Psychonauts 1. 4 fingers and a thumb are visible.

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But in the reception, well... it's *technically* there. If you look up to where it would be, you see... a giant piece of floating errant geometry which was almost certainly at some point part of a low LOD version of the classroom. Oops.

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If you somehow get past the initial bridge transition and make your way all the way to the low LOD representation of the cabins area, there is, for whatever reason, a big ol' transition trigger that will actually bring you to the cabins. I have NO idea why.

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fromCAKC2 though... well, that one *is* catastrophic. If you load in from one of the triggers that uses it then all you can see is grass. This is because Raz spawns outside of the world, where the camera can't follow him. To be specific he spawns vaguely behind and to the left of the waterfall.

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