Oh hey you're alive, also nice work.

thanks bby

Ooooh, I love this! Can you offer any information on the project's main concept, inspirations, tone and setting? What era of shooters are you taking most inspiration from - 90s, early 2000s, late 2000s, 2010s, contemporary? Genuinely VERY interested in knowing more about this.

Thanks<3

Oof, long poast tiem.
Main concept is going to be sort of like mashing up Receiver and Brutal Doom, if you've played both. Lots of physics based procedural animation, probably one game made with controls like Receiver where you're directly manipulating the gun with different controls for cycling the action, ejecting and inserting mags etc and a "main" game mode where those things are done more automatically like a conventional shooter. VR for the more granular controls would be dope. Would be fun to make it like a squad based type thing, buddy AI or multiplayer, but that's a lot to bite off for just me working on it.

Taking a lot of inspiration from games like , other than the two mentioned before, Prodeus, Quake, Stalker, Metro, and also the new Darktide teaser is very much the kind of really heavy, beefy impact I want in the action.

Setting is going to be like dieselpunk except big smoky dirty coal powered airships. Been calling it coalpunk. Pushing like late 1800s tech but airpiratey. Ideally would have more story than a lot of classic shooters. Tone will probably be rather grimdark, but I like levity in that sort of thing.

Taking bits and pieces from lots of different eras. I'm shooting for a visually late 90s sort of retro thing, but probably with a lot more atmospheric effects that you see in later stuff like Metro 2033. Rather low poly, heavy reliance on textures for detail, but with modern physics and procedural animation. Gameplay I haven't quite settled on going more boomer shooter or something a little slower and more methodical. I like them both and it will probably depend on what sort of story I want to tell.

Sounds like my kind of game! And yeah, multiplayer and friendly AI would take a looot of time to get working, probably not worth it considering the depth you're gunning for (pun intended) when it comes to the weapon handling. Networking and squad AI are both things that can either go really well or go really wrong. You could/should definitely do some prototypes for both though - like, in separate project folders, just for that one thing, be it squad AI or the networking element. Make it in a way that makes it easy to adapt into not just the game you're working on right now but also any future ones you might want to re-use the code for; use a different namespace than default, keep things well commented and documented within the code, don't reference any classes specific only to your current project, stuff like that. Helps build a portfolio too in case you decide to make a career out of it later on.

I do like the low poly style with detailed textures idea - but what about shaders and lighting? Do you plan on using simpler shaders like basic lambert or vertex lighting, or more complex shaders with phong/blinn-phong, normalmapping, possibly even PBR? Amid Evil, for example, makes heavy use of normal mapped sprites based on rendered 3D models which give off the effect of high fidelity 3D despite everything not part of the environment being simple quads, while older games like CSGO (2012 version) rely on texture detail and animation quality only to make the game look 'realistic' instead of model density or realtime lighting or anything fancy like that. Also, what do you think about texture filtering, and what do you plan on using for the game? Point filtering, bilinear, trilinear, ?

And you know what, I really like that you're taking inspiration from fundamentally different kinds of shooters - genre mashups, even within a single genre's subgenres, can allow for a lot of innovation and creativity to spring from it. But it can also go very wrong, so I do suggest you make a very, very thorough and very final design doc once you settle on exactly how much boomer shooter and how much tactical shooter you want the game to be before you start doing any code or level design for the game. For now just brainstorm the shit out of it and do art and concepts!

So yeah, I will definitely be keeping an eye out for any more content related to the game from you. Do you have a working title, or an internal name of sorts, or anything like that? Like, something I can refer to it by, not necessarily a final, commercial title. Thanks! Very eager to see how it turns out.

Still pretty early for ironing out the technical details honestly. I've been prototyping in Unity because I'm lazy, but I'll probably swap over to Unreal for the POWAH.

I'm definitely going to iron a story out first and go from there so everything is ludonarratively-artistically aligned.

I am a big stickler for really good animation. Amid Evil is also awesome with its art, although I'm not planning on doing super sprite heavy at the moment. Maybe for smaller assets that'll be fun. Normal maps I'll probably use as well. PBR will probably be on the table as well. I have less experience with shaders so that's on my list to dig into for the project because of how much atmospherics I'd like to use.

As far as a working title goes, nothing yet. In my head it's just "Gnoll Shooter" lol. If you check my twitter out https://twitter.com/hmmsheeper I poast the most over there and you'll see art and prototyping progress over there as I plug away at it in my free time. I'm probably going to shoot for really concise levels at first. I'm not a huge fan of totally open world stuff. Something like Mount and Blade's overmap exploration with airship stuff, then loading in some half-procedural levels for gameplay might be fun and would definitely be a lot more doable if I don't end up hiring team members.

Aye, you should definitely go for Unreal instead of Unity. While Unity is better in terms of performance, that's only really the case if you do the most tedious of microoptimizations. Like, replacing / 3 with * .333f level of micro, and even then it still gets slow on older systems rather quickly the moment things start to scale up. It's also incredibly programmer focused, so artists or designers lone wolfing it (e.g. I) tend to have a hard time. Unreal also just flat out looks better and has a lot more useful built-in tools in its editor, while Unity either requires you to get "preview packages" (work in progress features) or purchase stuff from the store or from third parties, which, even for just one seat, can get very, very expensive, very quickly. Not to mention how most Unity updates are about XR (AR, VR and MR) stuff, or minor optimizations that tend to make things worse, or preview packages that never leave the preview stage, etc etc, while Unreal actually tends to put out stuff like the recent light caustics effect (which isn't limited to just water, but also prisms and cups and stuff) and the new in-engine boolean geometry tools. Cool stuff!

And that last part does sound like a good idea. Besides systemic game design, going for computer generated content is your best shot in terms of minimizing work time and maximizing play time and replay value, which are both very important when you're a solo dev. It also helps with prototyping and optimization if the levels are smaller, since occlusion culling will be able to do its job far better than it would be able to in, for example, an open world game.

Followed you on Twitter, I'll keep an eye out on my timeline for anything related to the game. Cheers!

Thanks bby <3

Yeah unreal just kinda kicks ass, and even for a programmer it's better since it supports C coding instead of relying on Javascript or C#

True, true, it's just that Unity doesn't really have anything like blueprints, so it forces you to either know how to code, or learn to do so. Well, it does, but it's, would you guess it, in the Asset Store. Inflection on the 'ass' of 'asset'.

Plus, from what I've heard, doing straight up code in Unreal is a bit of a pain due to lacking documentation. Not that it's not there, but that it's not as thorough as one would probably want it to be. Just hearsay though, I don't know. Unity's docs were pretty shite back in the Unity 3D days, though, and only got better with 4, and then it was only halfway into 5's life (2016?) that it got proper good. So it's not like Unity's track record is that much better lol.