So, this is my own Quake like shooter that I have worked on for more than a year. I worked on in my spare free hours next to my school and work. This game is heavily inspired by shooters from the 90s/2000s. Think about the movement of Quake, the humour from Duke Nukem/Postal, AI/arena's inspired by Doom 2016, weakness point system inspired by Doom Eternal, battles in big open arena's like in Serious Sam and more! It has something from each game. Even my enemy the cultist is nearly identical to the most love/hated cultist enemy from Blood!
This project was never intended to become a real game. It was made to improve my coding skills. But somehow, I got quite far with the project itself (codewise). My most favourite part can be seen at 2:00 in the video below. That section of the level contains a disco fight which really shows what the game could have become.
- Quake inspired movement.
- Four simple test guns. (Shotgun, Dual Uzi, Laser gun, rocket launcher. The shotgun/rocket launcher were the most unfinished).
- Enemy AI.
- Three different enemy types.
- Weakness points on the enemy AI.
- Blood and gore placeholders.
- Sound effects placeholders.
- Placeholder textures/graphics.
- Enemy spawn wave system.
- UI management.
- Explosions.
- Trigger systems.
- Death/respawning system.
- Health pick-ups inspired by Serious Sam - First/Second Encounter.
- Ammo pick-ups.
- Walls, they will only destroy themselves when you kill all the enemies inside that area.
- Two secrets.
- One deathly trap.
- Launchpads.
- Teleporters.
- Unused thunder effect.
- Unused intractable light switches.
- Dev room to cheat myself guns/ammo. It also contains teleporters that lets you skip level sections.
Currently, I am not working on this game any more. The game became bigger than I ever intended. Turning it into a real game would require me many more years (and preferable more people). The same year when I worked on this game, I worked on another shooter for my school, which required me to do research on what makes a shooter good (link to this school project). This made me realize that polishing the game will require me to do way more work. This will prevent me creating fun levels as because I need more time to refine the game.
Another reason why I have decided to leave this project behind was that the Unity game engine started to work against me in a way which made developing the game not fun any more. Especially with its new HD render pipeline. Imagine working on a game for 5 minutes, and having to deal with the engine its issues for another few hours. The newer versions of Unity that just releases aren't that stable any more compared to the old Unity 5 days. The Unity devs have changed their strategy through the years with providing new updates. If you want to use the newest (non alpha/beta) version of the engine, you can better wait until it's LTS. The unstable bugs will work against you. Honestly, this makes creating a custom game engine really attractive for me. I wish that the Unity will be open source for free some day.
So, what am I going to do with my game? I have put all my ideas nicely in a game design document and will sit on it for a while. This game really needs a team. Code wise, I got far as an individual (which is impressive if I look at the list of current features). But there also needs to be art assets in the game, the game needs to be optimized, every little bit needs to be polished (especially the guns, they currently just don't feel like guns at all). But for now, it is one of my proudest portfolio pieces that I can show off. And you know what? Most of the code can be reused in newer projects! (But, you will have to wait until I can finally link you to my page of my newest unannounced game).
