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..
