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...
