[Prototype] Relentless
So we working on a spiritual remake of The Tainted called Relentless. We showed a few still at A MAZE still in 3rd person. Since then we have been testing various camera angels and have settled on a 1st person one. The link to the short http://blog.celestial-games.com/2013/10/relentless-1st-person-instead-of-3rd.html
This video is a demonstration of the 1st person camera we have right now. The AI and combat of the mobs is still pretty basic. The gun been used is a basic Assault Pulse Laser Rifle with medium accuracy and short range. More about guns when we have settled a few more details.
This video is a demonstration of the 1st person camera we have right now. The AI and combat of the mobs is still pretty basic. The gun been used is a basic Assault Pulse Laser Rifle with medium accuracy and short range. More about guns when we have settled a few more details.
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In terms of the game, are you guys planning any mechanics to set this apart from the other FPS's on the market (aside from the story), or will it be pretty straight forward FPS mechanics?
1st person features we have right now.
1) Full body in game camera fixed to head. (Current animation a little too jagged will be reducing the pitching from the head)
2) Weighted response to movement. Weapon speed and strength combined determine the rate at which your weapon will track the mouse. Head follows mouse cursor arms follow in accordance to the combination. So stronger characters can aim faster with heavier weapons.
3) Hands articulate onto each weapon the push back in the scenes here is actually on the weapon now the arms they follow.
4) Weight, I am not sure how well this comes across on the video, but the character's feels weighty (its a word I just made up). My main grip with 1st person games has always been that I like immersion and when the character can flip 180degree immediately I loose that feeling. I know why that's done and appreciate the player skill that's introduced, but its not the kinds of game we want to build.
Features on road map
1) Feet articulate to the terrain perfectly for you and mobs (not mobs in that video mind you that still
2) leaning forward or back arches the character no simply pull the head at right angles. this is necessary with the presence of the players toon in the scene.
3) Currently considered is the camera will stay true when your toon rolls left, right, forward or back. We might need to drop that feature if people get too motion sick.
In terms of the games game play, we aiming for schematic combat action scenes. Ai driven not scripted. There are 3 intelligences Machine, Animal and Human. On top each mob has a varying intelligent and aggression that determines its responses to all things. This is all taken from The Tainted we released in 2001 although I am adding one piece and removing some aspects as I discovered really smart does not mean fun. The environment is 12/16 (We really testing the scale to decide if we want 12 or 16 right now. 2km x 2km squared grids. Fast travel and vehicles to make it less tedious.
The game play focuses in order of emphasis combat, rpg, quests then back story as a setting. If we had the kind of budget for big fat back story cinematics I might draw that part forward but I don't think we cant coupe with that scale as it is this is already overly ambitious.
RPG elements are in part attributes, skills and gear primarily in the form of your weapon built in parts by yourself. Each part adding attributes to the weapons final behavior. The weapons add the deep rpg tier that reflects in the actually physical game play experience not just stats. I am excited and cautious about this part. For example the idea that the weight of the weapon makes it track slower due to your strength seams great on the outset, but might simply end up been an irritation. We way to early for any balancing on this aspect, But I suspect we going to need to define thresholds and say if it exceed a certain threshold you simply cant use the weapon.
There is some back and forth talk of melee in game. I am personally not a fan of it in 1st person so a lot of testing needed before I can confirm we will add anything other then the most basic desperate melee attack.
Personally I am not a typical 1st person fan. The 1st person games I have enjoyed are Half-Life/Decent 2 (does that count?)/Fall Out/Hexan/Borderlands and Skyrim. That might sound like a lot but it each case I was playing the story or loving the settings not playing a FPS. Its probably going to count against us that I am not building this as one would a typical FPS but we got to built what we love.
Multiplayer wise we focused on Co-Op no versus. Although we might add war games once again something The Tainted had.
*Its ironic that youtube offered to "steady" the cam since it was shaking as if held by hand. Was happy with that since its what we wanted. We using a very similar camera in Muti BTW one of the things I am doing is making sure we built technologies I can use between out games right now. Parley, Savvy and this controller all work for all the games.
When are you going to start testing the gun assembly thing? That sounds interesting!
Also, slow mouse response time for weapon movement? That is not a game that I would voluntarily play.
But it is definitely a big problem that I'm not sure ANYONE has solved very well. In most cases it seems like because of wider possible variety they individual crafting choices become less interesting than being forced to choose between a more limited selection.
I'm actually quite curious. The idea of being able to craft your own weapons comes up fairly often, has any game really succeeded at it in an FPS? (it's a pretty exciting design space either way).
Relentless is at its heart an Action RPG. When we built The Tainted originally one of the gaps we didn't close well enough was the quantity of gear items seen in typical fantasy RPG's versus the very few playable items in a sci-fi game. It didn't make sense then and still doesn't to me to have boots, rings, gloves, pants, etc. The quantity of gear in fantasy RPG's really does create a lot of small victory moments where you find something that doesn't change the game entirely but changes one small thing. Short cheap goals that draw the player along to his or the games medium goals.
I don't really call this Gun Crafting more just weapon assembly. Before that aspect of the game is playable you need to be able to level and fight various types of mobs that act differently. Gun parts are each of a level and set of abilities but come with a cost to your character. Current thinking is that some of those costs will reflect in the physical world such as weapon tracking. Dislekcia's concerns about that mirror my own, but we going to give it a bash before abandoning it entirely.
@BlackShipsFilltheSky I see the gun building as more of a RPG element then a FPS one. But a real concern here is how others will see it. If we end up attracting people that want a typical FPS experience we might simply fragment things or we might need to focus more on the experiences they would expect. This balance is one huge risk. I am not convinced every game has to have unique game-play mechanic. To start with the word unique doesn't imply anything good or bad only something unseen before. I know there is a very strong drive withing the forums to push this idea but I don't see anything wrong with taking well established game-play mechanics to build and deliver game experience. To borrow from movies, not every action movie needs to define the genre to be successful. I can see the allure and certainly the benefit to a small team of working on a core mechanic that's new, fresh and completely different. Its just not the only kind of game I plan to build. I have seen this issue in almost all MMO end game scenarios. Each new item is harder to get and everyone ends up with the same goals for there game play all grinding away for one item. (Can't think of anything more boring and I love MMO's but hate the end game). The thinking currently is, if your characters own skills such as strength, change what kind of parts you can assemble and in turn effect your on screen experience then the choices will be more and more personal and not limited to the same set of 5 things everyone wants. Whilst the characters are leveling this is an easy to solve issue since new levels of items become available. End game mechanic is still not considered right now.
Sigh the things we do for love*.
There, I fixed it for you. :P
Though, not sure if it fits humanoids so well. If there's one thing I've learned is that challenging people's existing preconceptions must be done very, very, very carefully. The mech games made sense cos mechanically turrets turn at speed X, but people expect all "people" FPSs to have 100% view-to-shot movement, so yeah, gotta get the design/theme of it just right to convey the mechanic so it doesn't seem "just because" and counterintuitive.
Love Mech games and there are bad guys that are mechanical, those limitations are going to be an aspect of the strategy as a human.
Plus you get to do awesome stuff like target tracking, misty breath on the inside, and...well...holograms!
We had to learn this with DD: "Randomly generated levels!" sounds like a feature, but actually isn't because it doesn't communicate anything to potential players. "Never the same level twice!" or "Keep coming back to play dungeons you've never seen before!" are both better. Even using the phrase "infinite replayability" needs interpretation, it only works on experienced gamers who know what that means (and you still have to say why). Features need to communicate Reasons (to play, to look, to buy).
Right now is when you can experiment with your game and find out what awesome shit you can do with it. Is it going to be realistic, so lasers have no travel time, have to focus on the same area for a while and can be absorbed by items of that colour? Is it crazy over the top (this is where I'd say rocket-powered-chainsaws, but Death Smashers already has those, and it's a great selling point) and you can have insane explosions all the time? I'm just not seeing you discovering the things that will make people talk about your game yet, so I'm wondering out loud if you're actually focusing on that problem. I think you need to.
P.S. Seriously, all you have to do to get people interested in Death Smashers is say "Rocket powered chainsaws!" and it's like a lightbulb goes on behind their eyes.
I think it is possible to test gun assembly on straw dummies, i.e. just killing straw dummies who drop weapon parts and killing stronger straw dummies who drop better parts. But that'd only be a good place to start if you wanted the assembly of guns to be a main marketing feature (and you wanted that super solid). Which doesn't have to be the case. Yeah, I partially agree.
I'm assuming the goal here is for a game to be marketable and sold (because obviously some games exist just for the pleasure of the creator or other even more obscure reasons). And I'm assuming we're talking about Relentless. So the statement would be "I am not convinced every [FPS] game has to have unique game-play mechanic [to be competitive in today's market]"
And that statement is still true. But I'd say that for a game to be competitive it does have to offer a new or improved experience.
Now if the gameplay is familiar that leaves you with fewer areas to compete on.
You can still theoretically compete on polish or art, but realistically you can't reach Borderlands or Fallout levels without scaling back your scope drastically (unless you can find a lot of money).
You could compete on delivering a compelling new narrative. Though in a FPS world using conventional story telling techniques might be a significant challenge as delivering that story can be expensive (animations and voice acting aren't cheap in an FPS).
There are other ways to tell new stories that don't rely on conventional story telling, like using new mechanics that deliver narrative through gameplay (but that again falls under relying on new mechanics).
So I'd say that Relentless doesn't need unique mechanics to be competitive. But I would say that that is by far the cheapest path to being competitive in a FPS. Like what Q.U.B.E did. Or what Antichamber did. Or what Super Hot are doing.
If you are planning on competing on story (and delivering a unique and compelling narrative). I'd imagine that getting some of the story telling into the game should be a priority.
@dislekcia I think there is something miss communicated here. I am putting feet and torso into the game because it annoys me when its not in a game. Not because I think we can put it on the side of a box "FPS now with FEET". I don't think its a key selling point. Your point on the "Rocket powered chainsaws!" might seem more redundant if you recall that Toxic Bunny has a Nitric Hamster Launcher (still the only known weapon to guarantee a fatality with every shot). I fully understand the value of a strong market distinction. I am mentioning the design choices as we go, not necessarily in order of importance to market position or creating hype but rather from an atheistic and given reason. I would point out that some of the feedback on the feet in camera has been exceptionally positive and enthusiastic. I don't thinks its a negative choice and I believe its cost to benefit ratio is good, but its not meant to be a side of the box feature.
PS:
Lasers may or may not end up with travel time. If its good enough for George its good enough for me :)
As both @BlackShipsFilltheSky and @dislekcia have mentioned some playing and seeing what works focusing on that will be needed. I agree with that emphatically.
And worrying about market strategy comes later : )
Projectile weapons are way cooler.