My New video game Onslaught, finally released...

I was originally going to wait till October 31'st on midnight to release onslaught... But a serious issue has come up. We are getting a tropical storm around that time where I live...  So I have to get the release out of the way now... Because I will not be on my PC to do it then.... It will be off and unplugged... Hopefully the Storm doesn't damage too much stuff.....  So here we go... I spent the whole night last night play testing most of the maps minus the secret maps... And it's complete...


The game, which is called Onslaught : the cult within, is based on an old idea for a FPS game me and a friend had back in 1995. We thought of the whole story, who the villains were, what you were as a player back then... You played as a cybernetic mercenary named "asshole", who happens to listen to extreme metal.  You get hired by a mercenary guild to stop a mad cult who is bombing all the cities in the world in an insane attempt to bring on the apocalypse. Since they control the secret military programs of every country they can actually do this... They also have access to nukes and worse. In 2078 they nuke Paris and Washington DC...   They then use secret experiments gone wrong, horrible abominations of nature, to wipe out the survivors.  Then by using technology gotten from tortured aliens they are able to clean up the radiation and set up a base in the ruins of DC. The group you work for is fighting this CSC cult and is losing. You are hired to do missions for them to stop this cult, from stopping more experiments from being created to stopping future nuking plots by the cult... As a cybernetic mercenary you can do things that most people cannot do, such as put a impenetrable forcefield around you, regenerate health, etc. A trailer was made for youtube recently, which you can view here:

The game is an old school/tactical  hybrid FPS game with a non linear level system and many other features. You choose what missions you want to do with a mission computer in your HQ which is always the first map you start. The HQ has no enemies in it, and you can use a switch to chose missions and then another to start the mission you chose.... You can also buy items and weapons with money you earn in each mission, 5 minutes in, based on how many kills you get...  In each mission you face enemy counts from 150 to around 1000. It's a lot like serious sam. But in difficulty and realism terms it's more like STALKER. You will die very quickly if you don't take cover and remember to heal yourself often with medical kits and other methods, such as cybernetic upgrades and "eating gibs" to heal yourself.

As a cyborg, you also get cyborg powers you can use at any time. You have 5 powers, activatable with the f1-f5 keys. F1 cloaks you. F2 heals you to a certain degree. F3 gives you nightvision mode which makes cloaked mutants (very common and annoying) visible. F4 puts a forcefield around you for at least 10 seconds making you invincible. F5 is called metal rage and by default makes you fire your guns twice as fast for 20 seconds or so. All of these powers can be upgrade by buy able upgrades available at the HQ levels.  Make sure to use these wisely, because they are needed to survive even basic levels on higher skill settings.

In the HQ map the "exit door" on the right in the second room leads to the mission computer room. The switch (grey notched texture) on the column selects the mission you want to do next. Press it again to select the next one. It will keep selecting the next one till you get to the end... The other switch warps you to the mission you selected....  If you go back to the previous room outside the mission control room, and go the other way away from the entrance of the level, you will see an open door on the right hand side of the next room.  This room leads to the item store.. There are 2 more switches here... The left switch cycles through items to buy and prints the cost of the current selected one also. The right switch buys the correct item but only if you have enough credits to do so...

Level design wise, I ended up using a random map generator that makes great urban themed maps to make all the levels. I really don't care if idiots say this is bad.... Blah blah blah...  I don't even care... It works for me... But really I never even cared if the maps were hand crafted or not...  I did end up editing them quite heavily afterwards, by adding dynamic lighting, enemy placement changes,  etc...

The textures were taken from many sources, mostly free texture download sites and a HL1 texture pack called the Photorealistic texture pack... They were all enhanced with a free Painting program, using a bump mapping filter, since Gzdoom cannot do bump mapping.

The enemy, item and weapon graphics came from custom enemies that came from realm667.com. This is a repository for  items, weapons, and enemies made for zdoom that are brand new.. Many of them used or use sounds from other games... I tried to remove as many as possible by replacing the sounds with sounds from Freedoom (what this is based on), and custom recorded horror styled screams, etc... But I may have missed a few.... It's not my fault really,  many custom enemies use sounds and graphics from other games... I didn't make them.. so Don't blame me. I got most of the skyboxes from a Jdoom skybox pack, and some other sources, a skybox pack made for Gzdoom. Something like  that, I forget where...

The game is quite scary at times... Mutant enemies (the CSC experiments mentioned above) are very scary in nature and make loud screaming noises often. At least one has the ability to scare you shitless. There are also randomly played ambient sounds that sound like a monster but are not, to freak you out... and randomly occurring night zones, when the whole level will go dark to freak you out for 20 seconds, accompanied by a screaming noise and a monster teleported near or behind you. The game also has a scripted day/night cycle as well, using appropriate skyboxes, and light coloring effects. The game's time scale is increased so each day goes by in 20 minutes, so it's more obvious in the smaller levels....


Anyway... The actual game has been released and tested quite a bit.... It's available here. Download the zip file and unzip all files  to a new folder, C:\ons or something like that. Then run gzdoom.exe in that folder to play... Doom itself is not required to play... It is totally standalone, but uses a free copy of freedoom as an IWAD, because I don't know how to make an IWAD myself to make this standalone any other way. Freedoom is a completely free and non-id software based resource set and IWAD that allows people to play Doom levels that are custom without actually owning doom itself. All of the content in it is new, So I thought it was the perfect base IWAD to include in this, because I cannot be sued for simply distributing it, unlike a copy of the doom2.wad that comes with Doom 2. The game requires at least a system with these system requirements:

Pentium 4 1.8 GHZ, 1 GB Ram, Ati-Radeon 8500 or Nvidia Geforce 4 TI or higher, decent soundcard, and   450 MB of free disk space, Windows as an operating system.

I tested it on my system which has these specs:

Pentium Dualcore 3.0 GHZ, 2 GB ram, Nvidia Geforce GT 520, soundblaster live external USB soundcard, Windows XP.

Make sure to configure your controls with the options menu > configure controls options before playing. I recommend new players to play now higher than "badass" (medium) due to the difficulty.


Neccisary but pointless Disclaimer : This game has lots of bad language, gore, bathroom humor, and other "offensive" content... Just a friendly warning... This is for mature gamers only... Not something that should be exposed to young kids..

Onslaught : Free FPS video game being made by me.

Back in 1995, me and a friend came out with an awesome idea for a FPS game.  In it you played as a cybernetic mercenary who happens to be a die hard metalhead/heavy metal music fan.  You started down in cape cod, MA or in a prison in outer space (in later drafts of the game idea).  A mercenary guild called the Anti-Social Services (or A.S.S. for short) would contact you and offer to hire you to do work against the main villains of the game, a mad cult called the Cult of the Serpent Church, which was in total control of at least the US and Canada during this time (the game took place around 50-60 years from now, in post apocalyptic ruins of cities). This cult was attempting to exterminate humanity, for whatever reason. They nuked washington DC and Paris a few months before the game started. They had total control of every major countries militaries. The Anti-social services were fighting them and losing. So they hired you, the cybernetic mercenary to help them out. You would be whisked off to many different cities along the whole east coast of the US, the move to the west coast, then Canada, then Antarctica, then finally the ruins of DC for the final level to fight and kill the mad cult leader. We named the character you played as as bastard at the time. He was really a badass, Duke3d like character, with BAD one liners, etc. My friend wanted the character to be a real anti-hero. Not a goody too shoes. The plan fit. For the next 6 years from 1996 to 2002  we kept on thinking of enemy, weapon, and level ideas. We had hundreds of each. The plan was getting so ridiculous that we eventually stopped updating it and scrapped it. We wanted it to be  given to a game company, and get paid. It never happened... But that doesn't mean Onslaught is not being made.. MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!

Using Gzdoom you can easily make standalone games without using anything from the parent game (doom 1/2 etc). I've been doing just this to make onslaught as a standalone Game, using Freedoom as a base. Freedoom is a free Doom IWAD, and allows anyone to play any doom addon without the full game even installed. Using resources from realm667.com I have managed to recreate many of our old ideas for monsters, cult soldiers and weapons. Only thing left was levels. Not a big fan of doing my own maps for Gzdoom I decided to use a really good Doom Random Map generator that does really well designed urban levels (for that time anyway). I used these levels as a base and simply retextured them with free Photorealistic urban textures, and added enemies here and there and tweaked other things. The project is almost done, after almost 15 years of developement time! I plan to release it by midnight on Halloween 2012. Some things need to be changed though... Not major changes mind you, but some minor issues. But most of it has been completed, including all 32 levels.

Gameplay wise, onslaught is quite different from normal shooters. Number 1 it is excruciatingly difficult on higher skill settings, and even has heart attacks simulated in it's scripting library for low health. Number 2, since you play as a cyborg (now being called Asshole), you get to use cybernetic powers with the f1,f2,f3,f4 and f5 keys. F1 gives you a temporary cloaking ability. F2 heals you. F3 gives you nightvision that allows you to see invisible mutant enemies. F4 puts up an impenetrable force field around the player for at 10 seconds at the default level.  F5 is the best though. It's called Metal rage, and is aptly named. After screaming out a metal related phrase at the top of his lungs, our character gets 2x boost to weapon fire rate for quite some time.  Using Forcefield and Metal Rage make the game much more bearable because you do 2x fire speed and are invincible.  F2 can save you from some bad situations. In this game you get punished for low health a lot more than others. Once your health drops below 75 you start bleeding, making your health drop slowly over time. The lower your health gets, the more health is subtracted per 2 seconds.  It's important to keep your health above 75.  Good thing that there are many ways to heal you. Health kits are everywhere but you can use them any time you want... Also killing enemies gibs them even with light weapons. You get health by eating gibs in this.  The more gibs you create per kill the more health you will get.  Using machineguns is advisable because you cause more damage per second. Adding metal rage doubles it so always hit f5 to make it more gory. More guts, more health. In this game enemies are around every corner at the start and you eventually run into 200+ per level later on. It becomes like serious sam, enemy concentration wise. Combine that with the difficulty and you get a mix of tactical and twitch shooter gameplay aspects. I think it's quite cool.

In terms of level progression, this is quite different from most FPS games. Each level is linear for the most part but the progression from level to level is not. You start the game in your HQ. Once you go into the computer room, you get to flip a switch that selects what mission you want to do. Flipping it again selects the next one, till you reach the last, and flipping it then will select the 1st again.  Flipping another switch warps you to the selected mission. Once you finish the level the mission is in you return to the HQ with your guns stripped from you to ensure you start each level from scratch. There are so many guns in this game that carrying them over from level to level will make it too easy. 25 guns is a lot. You can replay all the levels multiple times and more levels will be made later to make it even more fun, so that you get not 32 but 64 levels to explore. 32 more bonus levels... This in scope is closer to something like Skyrim then a normal FPS game. although each level is totally linear (the random level generator has no option to remove locked doors, etc to make it nonlinear), it is still fun. In a bonus pack down the road you will get an option to go on a "vacation" and explore a randomly chosen map from the 32 bonus ones.... Something to make the game more replayable.

You also get money in this game to use on spending on new guns to start new missions with. Once you visit every room in the first HQ map you will run into buy and sell switches in another room.  Pressing one selects the item to buy. Pressing it again selects the next one, etc. Pressing it once you reach the end makes it select the 1st. Pressing the second switch buys the selected item for the mentioned cost.  The difference in Onslaught is that the money comes as a bonus for good performance 5 minutes in in any level. The more monsters you have killed by the 5 minute mark, the more money you get.  So in harder levels, you get better rewards, money wise... The game has innocent civilians who are all big assholes but are not hostile... You get generic male civis, female civis, teachers, violent video game protestors and idiots from doomworld.  They all count as enemies to kill so killing them will get you more money..  Each is a parody on idiots of real life.  Male civilians, and female civilians are based on idiots I dealt with in real life. Teachers are based on the idiots we had for teachers in many schools I went to.  The video game protestors were a semi-joke making fun of real life anti violent game activists. Killing them is optional and often time they get killed by the enemies by accident... There are at least 10 per level in most levels..

In terms of how easy it is to use stuff to make a game, you really have to be careful what you use. I had to change sounds for 99% of the enemy cast, and had to cut many enemies and weapons because idiots on realm667 were uploading custom monsters and weapons that used sounds from other games. This is something that can get you sued as a game developer, for distributing copyrighted sounds from another game, even though you weren't the one who ripped the sounds from the other game in question. I had to cut out a LOT to get around this and it pisses me off. You'd think the people in charge of that site would add a stipulation that says (non-infringing content only!) but they don't. It isn't my fault that half of that stuff steals content from other games and it pisses me off.  I had to get rid of 40% of the old stuff due to this. Not a small %.

The textures I used come from many sources, but none come from other games. Most are from a photorealistic texture pack released on half-life forums years ago. Since gzdoom supports hires textures this was the obvious choice for good looking GFX. Add the dynamic lighting around torches that you can boost by setting the max size and intensity of all lights,  and you can make the old gzdoom engine look as good as HL2 graphics wise, maybe not architecture wise, but it looks almost that good.  Some textures came from free texture download sites which don't exist anymore. I altered many to get them to tile and bump mapped every single texture in a painting program to make them look even better. The sheer amount of graphic detail the environment has in it is insane in Onslaught.... Here is a trailer I uploaded to youtube today...

Check that out... I plan to release it soon, within the next 2 weeks or so.... I plan to release the game as a free download in 2 week or so. It won't require any doom game to play.. Completely standalone. It WILL require hardware acceleration though because it uses lots of dynamic lighting and high-res textures and skyboxes.Stay tuned...