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[Radix]

This is a game I'm working on with a small team. It's for Windows, Mac & Linux and was originally based on

I did a while back. I've been working on it mostly-alone on and off for about a year, but we've recently kicked into for-reals development and are aiming for a beta release in a couple of months--but you can play an early demo right now. I mean, if you want to.

Deathmatch gameplay:



The idea is that you'll be able to use a familiar interface (Minecraft-style block placement) to build FPS maps from terrain/props,  weapons, enemies and level elements inspired by classic FPS games like Wolf3D/Doom/Quake/Goldeneye and Turok (there's dinosaurs). Also the team took a vote and we ended up with stuff like Tron, BioShock and Halo as well.



You can string together a series of levels with some sort of story to make a single-player campaign, or a co-op map, or a multiplayer arena, then you can share it with friends or the internet in general. There's a simple trigger/channel system that lets you set up traps and make weird logic for puzzle or gimmick levels if you want, but nothing more complex than that: no scripting-type stuff, everything is block-based.



Or you can just play other people's levels, and never build anything at all. I'm hoping to have a huge number of multiplayer modes like Timesplitters or Halo so there'll be lots of reasons to kill people. If you're more peaceful you can join your friends in collaborative multiplayer creative mode instead, and let them hog the credit for the cool shit you build.

I'm the designer and programmer for almost everything besides the level database and lighting system, so if you hate something it's my fault. I'm also doing the sound effects.

It has pretty cool music by BoyVsBacteria:
https://soundcloud.com/blowfishstudios/bierenstein-side-b
https://soundcloud.com/blowfishstudios/tremor-type-b
https://soundcloud.com/blowfishstudios/bathyscape-side-a



Theme Packs
The game content will be organised into packs, each of which contains a bunch of weapons, building blocks, special elements (traps/teleporters/jump pads/doors etc), player models and enemies inspired by a particular game. They're meant to be totally interchangeable parts so you could say take the submarine-like bulkheads from the BioShock-inspired pack and combine them with computers from the Quake-inspired pack and a starfield skybox from somewhere to make a rusty hulk of a spaceship. Then fill it with velociraptors and demonspawn or whatever.

The plan is to have a bunch of theme packs in the first release and then keep making as long as people are playing the game. We'll probably charge a buck or two for later ones, but your first few are free. (Or you'll probably just be able to "buy the game" and get everything forever, none of this is really certain yet.) Note that you never need to buy anything if you just want to play levels and don't care about building them or using the cosmetic player models in MP. As long as you own all the packs used in a level you make anybody will be able to play your level, and when you invite people to help you work on your level in multiplayer creative mode they'll be able to use whatever packs you have.



Weapons
So far there's about 36 planned weapons which range from railguns and cerebral bores to freezethrowers and laptop turrets. I've tried to include every iconic weapon from these games that I could think of without getting too nuts and forgetting the workhorses like tommy guns and super shotguns. Since that's a lot of ammo to keep straight we decided to go for an ammo pool system where most weapons (with the exception of melee types and consumable weapons like grenades) use varying amounts of one of three ammo types: metal (red), chemicals (green), or energy (blue). It's pretty much the same as Doom where different weapons shared your Bullet or Cells pools.
Right now I'm keeping ammo limits pretty tight to keep things moving in multiplayer. Let me know if you hate this I guess?



Check out an early demo
This is real early but I've got a build for you to try out some creative mode and deathmatch gameplay.


v0.2.4891
Windows, OSX and Linux builds available on this downloads page from now on.

Known issues with this version:
- Player animations are kinda wonky due to blending issues. It's in the pipe.
- Weapon feedback is kinda weak right now. Muzzle flashes/fist animations don't appear in third person, and I think there should be clearer feedback when you're damaging somebody.
- When you first join a game in progress you might not see other players' current weapons right away.
- Sometimes you spawn underground when you first join. Respawns will be fine. I have no fucking clue what is up with this.
- Lag compensation is currently basic, and works well at lower pings with the tradeoff of occasional weirdness particularly at higher latencies.
- Rounds don't always end. A new round should start after someone has achieved (currently locked to) 25 frags, but this doesn't always happen. Not that it matters much.
- The freezethrower weapon is still a work in progress and has a number of minor issues.

If you spot something new please let me know either in the thread or via PM. Thanks!

Right now I'm especially interested in latency. We're using a weird cloud server setup for multiplayer and I'm not sure how consistent it is, especially for regions other than Asia (we've done all our testing on Asia only). Feedback is appreciated! Let me know how the game felt and what kind of ping you got on your nearest server region (there's a counter in the lower-right of the screen). Note that the reported ping isn't really your actual ping but I'll be able to interpret it. Anything below 300 is usually good.



Further info
If you want to follow development you could try my twitter: @theradix
Or check the website (playgunscape.com), but it's pretty WIP right now. Feel free to shit up the forum though.
Or just keep an eye on this thread. I'll keep posting builds as I have them.

(This is a crosspost from the paywalled SA thread.)

[eigenbom]

I love the graphics, and I enjoy a good construction kit. :D

[Radix]

in this game you can help your friends fight dinosaurs if you want to

[matwek]

Looking pretty awesome. It looks like its got all the bits of Timesplitters that I enjoyed.

Are there plans to have the textures of the blocks edited by users?

[Tuba]

Cool idea. The visuals are great, but the demo is still too raw

Looking forward to this! 

[Radix]

Are there plans to have the textures of the blocks edited by users?

That came up for the first time earlier today, coincidentally. Letting players create their own cosmetic assets is something that we'll consider but I'm not sure what form it'll take right now.
For the moment, with over a hundred block types plus props and other special elements in the currently planned content it's not a high priority.

[marvinhawkins]

in this game you can help your friends fight dinosaurs if you want to

you had me at Dinosaurs....

[Dragonmaw]

Gunscape is fantastic. It's the game I wanted all those other shitty construction shooters (Ace of Spades, Guncraft) to be.

Loads of fun, especially if you're into stuff like Timesplitters, Quake 3, or Perfect Dark.

Question: Can players create functional multiplayer maps with the demo at the moment?

[DangerMomentum]

I saw gifs of this in a thread elsewhere and absolutely love what you've got here. Going to be following this closely for sure.

[Türbo Bröther]

Will there be blocks with sloped faces or is it just going to be ninety degree angles everywhere?

[Radix]

Thanks guys.

Will there be blocks with sloped faces or is it just going to be ninety degree angles everywhere?

There'll be one or two angled terrain-type blocks (ramps, stairs, or angled walls/ceilings) in most theme packs. Plus props, which can be used as terrain features. I also have some ideas about advanced tools that'll let you do complex surfaces, but it's a long way off. The idea for now is to keep map creation as simple as possible.

Question: Can players create functional multiplayer maps with the demo at the moment?

Next week. Multiplayer creative mode is working well at the moment, too.

[Türbo Bröther]

I also have some ideas about advanced tools that'll let you do complex surfaces, but it's a long way off.

Something like Cube Engine perhaps?

[Radix]

Probably not very similar to cube, which is a pretty freeform 3D editor, as in this case it all needs to fit into the block placement paradigm. But we'll see; if it happens it'll be a long way off, for now the game is more about combining the huge amount of stuff in your toolkit in cool ways.


Update post:
New build is up! This week for me has been mostly about bugfixes and getting creative mode into a better state. It's looking good so hopefully next week you should be able to create your own deathmatch maps (singleplayer and co-op will be a little while yet, mostly because I have a huge backlog of new blocks/enemies/special elements that aren't fully implemented yet) either alone or in a collaborative multiplayer session. You can jump in and out of action mode while editing to test your level/shoot each other a bit on the fly.

I've also been looking into the netcode a bit and think I can do some major optimisations next week, along with finally finishing the lag compensation.

v0.1.4755
Download Windows version: (Dropbox, ~55mb)
Download OSX version: (Dropbox, ~55mb)
Download Linux version: (Dropbox, ~57mb) (Linux version may currently crash when hosting or joining but you can try the maps offline at least.)

Important changes (mainly minor fixes this week):
- Invert mouse, mouse sensitivity, world FOV and viewmodel FOV options now present in the settings screen.
- Timer fix for the concrete saw weapon in the starship map, so it should be useable now.
- Chat should scroll correctly (sometimes messages were disappearing too quickly when the chat box was nearly empty).
- Placeholder punching SFX replaced: you can now hear when you're hitting someone versus whiffing.
- Audio now plays during deathcam.
- DM01 was meant to have ambient music, now it does.
- Some shader fixes for Windows builds.
- Mousewheel now does the same thing as Q. A proper weapon swapping UI is coming, I promise.
- (Lots of fixes/some new tools in Creative mode but it's not quite ready yet.)

[Radix]

Merry Saturday.

[Whiteclaws]

Holyshmurf

This looks amazing !

[Radix]

Here's a gif I've been meaning to make about one particular block type: window blocks.



Window blocks are more than just a cubemap; they act like a scene with a skybox camera so they can contain animated elements (there's meant to be sharks swimming around in this one but it isn't quite finished yet) and parallax effects. With most window blocks, neighbouring windows merge into a single long window.
By choosing a different window scene from your world skybox you can have effects like a player starting off outside on a planet surface before getting teleported up to a space ship which uses windows that show a starfield rather than sky. Or you can set your windows and skybox to the same scene to allow for impossible mazes or architectural tricks like having a clear view of the sky in a room that has stuff built over it.

[Radix]

Hey guys, new build is up! This time you have access to creative mode, meaning you can build, host and share your own maps (albeit in a prototype version of the menus/level browser which'll hopefully be replaced over the next few weeks). Currently you're limited in the blocks you can use, which is mainly a time thing--I should have time to start importing all the new blocks that have been made and start setting up all the special elements (traps etc) from the unimplemented theme sets that have been created soon.
Also, you're still restricted to deathmatch when you host a game: other MP modes and singleplayer/co-op will still be a while. However! You can host a multiplayer creative game and edit maps with buddies right now, and jump in/out of test mode to shoot each other as much as you want, which is pretty fun.



Windows version
Mac version
Linux version

I'm not gonna post these around too much elsewhere until tomorrow since they haven't been tested much outside the OSX build--I'd really appreciate it if anyone could give it a try and report back! If you build a cool level and want to share them with the world, just hit the "Publish" button when it's ready to be made public. You should also be able to host deathmatch games with any shared level or any of your own levels, regardless of whether you've made them public or not. Have fun!

In particular, I'm interested in how the Windows version plays for people (the first time I tried it out on my personal Windows PC I noticed some weirdness, but it worked fine after that, was it just a fluke?).

Linux build hasn't really been tested either, if anyone wants to give it a try. I plan to look into it more in the morning but today was real busy. Hopefully it works though!

Remember, this is a very early version. The interface and creative mode/editing tools have a long way to go.

edit:
Oh yeah, here's a couple of the new maps that happened today. Killing people on a map made by someone else for the first time was kinda rad!

[Radix]

Hey! We just went live on Kickstarter!

After working on this thing for a year, often alone, sometimes with the help of a great team that does really radical work way beyond what I've been able to do in my games in the past, this is a big exciting thing. I'm wicked nervous, and hopeful, and invite everyone to have a look and share it with others if you think it's a cool thing. I think it's cool. And I really want to see what kind of cool stuff people make with it. Thanks!

And thanks so much to everyone that's helped out with ideas/suggestions/bughunting and playing in all those deathmatch testing sessions. Especially the great IRC people and those that have retweeted/posted this thing in places already.

Check it out here:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1786613985/gunscape

I'm gonna put a big image in the OP for you to click on if you prefer to click on big images.

[DangerMomentum]

Backed!

One suggestion; I just lost about an hour of map creation because I accidentally clicked Quit when I meant to test and there was no "Are you sure?" message. Adding one of those would be a huge help. Also, adding a test button to the Esc menu in craft mode would be nice too. Still, awesome work! Can't wait to actually frag people.

[dancing_dead]

I generally don't like low-poly graphics, mostly because they go hand-in-hand together with some nasty flat color textures, but I have to say this is looking pretty nice - dirty and gritty!

good luck!