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"Night of the Living Sausage" is a short fangame inspired by the Ordinary Sausage Youtube channel.
A retro-themed first-person shooter, Night of the Living Sausage features pre-rendered sprite enemies, 9 dual-wieldable weapons, multiple pickups, classic fun gameplay mechanics, and plenty of jokes and channel/Discord server references. It was built with a focus on the particular style and feel of many older licensed tie-in games of the 90's and early 00's, and while it's rather polished by those standards, there's still a certain degree of roughness or jank left in for the purpose of charm. Navigate a quarantined city block, outrun and chop through multiple horrific and totally-not silly culinary abominations, blow some stuff clear across the map with rockets, enjoy the atmosphere, and just have a good time!
The game includes simple controls, full controller support, accessiblity-forward design and options, no dialogue, is about an hour long for a normal playthrough, and targets low- and mid-range computer hardware. You can replay an endless mode, restart the game from any chapter you've reached, and go at entirely your own pace, or enable the run timer to see how quickly you can complete the game. I hope you enjoy!
Night of the Living Sausage is a wave-focused FPS, basically a blend of original DOOM and Call of Duty's Zombies modes. Enemies will constantly spawn across the map, and your way forward is through them. Occasionally, some bosses will appear, each one taking a different tactic to defeat. Weapons, health, and temporary buffs will appear around the map to offer you help. All weapons can be dual-wielded, and cover ranged, melee, and thrown types, with a few special ones. The game also features multiple classic platforming techniques, such as wall and rocket jumping. Many aspects of the game are entirely the player's decision to approach as well. The only goal is to slay enough enemies to progress and defeat the final boss; how you do that is up to you. A slow and methodical approach, rationing ammo, keeping track of nearby health pickups, and utilizing the basic stealth system for extra sneak attack damage is perfectly acceptible, whereas classic FPS fans and more chaotic players may prefer to (and this isn't an exaggeration) carpet-bomb the enemies from above via intentional physics exploits. This game is very much intended as a blank canvas for any player to approach as they wish. You could even try a run almost entirely using the default fist weapons, which have some special properties...
The game is set in a quarantined city block, with a mix of open and narrow areas. Cars, plants, and other objects are spread throughout the play area to create choke points and platforming opportunities. Streetlights illuminate the area, and they're susceptible to your weapons as well, so be careful where you aim! The environment is intended to be very atmospheric, using a unique form of retro-style fog that'll shift as you progress. Currently, the play area is entirely outdoor, save for a parking garage, but this may change if the game receives enough support.
Night of the Living Sausage features pre-rendered sprite art for all characters and many objects. The low-poly 3D geometry of many current retro-styled shooter games is certainly nice, but I like the quirkiness that comes from flat sprites, and the effects that can be achieved. The sprites of enemies featured in this game are a mix of 3D models rendered in Blender CAD Guides, flat sprites designed in Inkscape, and frames taken directly from Ordinary Sausage videos. Just as well, most environmental sprites such as trees are Blender renders or Inkscape designs, while most ground and building surfaces are photo textures.
Night of the Living Sausage grew from the initial idea to recreate the original Doom's "E1M1 / At Doom's Gate" level song with Mr Sausage's score "boop" noises into a full game experience. Designed and scripted in Unity, it was intended as a simple wave shooter that morphed into something with a bit more direction. Unity's now-infamous "Runtime Fee" decision led to me pausing development for a while, unsure of how I wanted to proceed, not just with this game but with others moving forward.
I eventually decided to simply polish up what I already had planned, and set aside the much more vast ideas for a later version in a different game engine sometime in the future. The polish in question ended up, like in many such projects as this one, to be quite a bit more than planned. Extra characters, weapons, and mechanics were added, with proper boss fights as well. While there's still no set plot to follow, there's much more direction to the experience now. Although, "perfect is the enemy of done" and whatnot, so I had to release it eventually.
If this game gets enough support, then I'd love to keep adding to it! A Steam release, multiplayer (the foundation of which is already implemented), new enemies and levels, these are all things I'd love to spend the time and effort to add. But, time and effort are fleeting, and given as much of both I've already put into this project, more will only come with sufficient support. It takes time chasing down that one wrong variable name you accidentally copy-pasted, y'know!
So if you have fun playing (or even just watching someone else play) this game, then first and foremost, thank you! And, if you're willing and want to see more, then please consider becoming a Patron. You can join for as little as $3 a month. If you'd prefer a one-time donation, then please check out my Ko-Fi, or include a donation with your download of the game via the Itch.io page.
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