Emotional Roadblock

Emotional Roadblock

Gallery

Emotional Roadblock
Official 3D render of the Emotional Roadblock, image credit to the cutting room floor.
Biography
Gender	Undisclosed
Race	Systemic Mental Figure
Occupations	Emotional Roadblock
Status	Unused (Cut from the final game)
Physical Description
Skin Color	White and Orange
Hair Color	Barbed Wires (Bronze)
Eye Color	Dark Aqua
Gameplay
Appearances	Psychonauts (planned to)
Mind	Lungfishopolis Black Velvetopia

“Emotional roadblocks are there for a reason, there are somethings we don’t want to remember. But we can’t un-forget things, so we set up temporary blocks to steer us away from those memories.”

–Psychopedia description

Also called the Emotional Roadblock is an unused mental figure intended to be obstacles found inside mental worlds in Psychonauts. For unknown reasons, it never made it into the final game.

Appearance

They are literal roadblocks, mostly resembling to barricades with notorious smallish eyes near the top, part of their structure is made to form a frowned gesture, lastly presents barbed wires and a light on the right side. Size-wise, it seems it could have been a lot bigger than the Emotional Baggages and even Razputin himself.

Description

General gameplay information from the files

"Some simple, unfinished code for the scrapped Emotional Roadblock enemy can be found, grouped with many other very old scripts. It doesn't seem like the roadblock was developed very far before being cut.

It has 5 states: WHIMPER, BURNING, DAMAGE, DEATH and BLOCKING

BURNING, DAMAGE and DEATH are, as expected, generic functions for handling those events.

Its default state is the whimper state. It stays in this state so long as Raz is more than 1500 units away, or invisible (it seems intended to also ignore Raz if he's moving slowly, but the code for checking this seems to be incorrect). Once Raz is less than 1500 units away, it enters a the "BLOCKING" state.

The blocking state doesn't seem to do anything unique (besides likely having a different animation) other than checking Raz's distance so that it can switch out of the blocking state once he's out of range. The game does have a second check to see if Raz is less than 1000 units away, but if it passes, it just sets the roadblock into the blocking state again. It's likely that another state was intended to go there that was never created and given that the variable used to set this range is called "saferange", it's possible that the roadblock would've started attacking once the player entered this range.

Finally, if interacted with, the roadblock prints "Get Away Little Boy!" and "Grrrr" to the log.

Besides this barebones behaviour, the only remaining notable thing about the entity is that it has a message handler for receiving a "Set" message, which causes it to print "Received BVLL Message that I'm SET". This is notable because BVLL is an early Black Velvetopia level that no longer exists, suggesting the roadblock played some specific role in that level at some point."

Information obtained from this The Cutting Room Floor page.

Trivia

• The design of this obstacle seems to be highly based off the Emotional Baggage, specially the Steamer Trunk.
• Files of the 2013 build of Psychonauts reveals that two mental worlds already were planned to have this obstacle being:
  • Black Velvetopia, thanks to an official prerelease image of an early version of the level and documentation "Scripts/gen_EmoRoadblock.lua:42"
  • Lungfishopolis, while no images reveals if this is true documentation exists to prove it "Documents/Build Notes/LO_walkthrough.txt"