Gunscape - FPS Construction Kit

[Captain Kupo]

Steam Greenlight
Kickstarter

Found this the other day. its a voxel based fps that lets you make maps for single player or multiplayer with blocks, enemies, characters, guns, and music based on a variety of different FPS themes (Doom, Quake, Turok, Bioshock, Wolfenstein, Halo, etc)

Give it a try and throw some money at it if you like it, i thought it was pretty cool, and you guys might like it.

[Hypnotoad]

This looks really cool.

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So I got in contact with the author of this, turns out he plays Zandronum! He said he'd be willing to make an account and answer any questions if we have any.

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Some excerpts of our chat, pasted by his request to show he is sincere in wanting feedback from the doom community:

<Radix> i guess it's obvious where the influences in gunscape come from so i really care what doom players think
...
<Hypnotoad_> will this game support scripting?
<Radix> i don't want to scare off people with a scripting interface when i think i can achieve everying with the block-building editor paradigm, but there's a trigger/channel system that can pretty much support the typical stuff you'd do in a doom map (this was a goal when i was working out how it should work)
...
<Hypnotoad_> anyway, does your game have an irc channel for it or anything?
<Radix> nope. ive been thinking about it though, it'd be good for organising matches since there's not always games running yet
<Hypnotoad_> yeah i definitely think you should make one, i'd recommend making one on quakenet
<Radix> oh yeah, good idea
<Radix> i'll do it some time in the next couple days then

[Tomthetom]

I played this a bit earlier. This game is ama-fucking-zing.

[jwaffe]

Reminds me a lot of cube 2: sauerbraten

[chesse20]

whatever
5/10

[Lord_of_D:]

i've heard about this in another forum and im not sure what to think about it, aside from the retro look, the graphics seems to be out of date, even for an indie game, not mentioning it use Minecraft/Lego's aesthetic style, which give it less points

[mr fiat]

hey this looks pretty interesting, i wish the guy luck hopefully people wil pick this up and it might become popular.

[Medicris]

Bloody hell, I hate how a "selling point" of so many games these days is "Hey old gamers it's retro! Look at these cubes and squares everywhere, 32x32 textures on daikatana models and faux-commodore music! Just like your old favourites!".

Aside from that I guess it's neat, but seriously, the "retro" or "old-school graphics" tagline is getting abused by so many devs who don't understand that games back then looked nothing like theirs, or why games back then even looked the way they did. Hardware limitations. Not an easy way to get attention and appeal to "90's gamers".

Like cool, we get it if high-definition 3d games are expensive to make. But at this point, the whole "it looks totally retro dudes you know you like old games" explanation isn't cutting it anymore. It's done to death.

That and most of the spritework in those games almost always looks like ass and something that would embarrass even the shoddiest of SNES games. I'm looking at you, Terraria and Starbound.

[Freariose]

Bloody hell, I hate how a "selling point" of so many games these days is "Hey old gamers it's retro! Look at these cubes and squares everywhere, 32x32 textures on daikatana models and faux-commodore music! Just like your old favourites!".

Aside from that I guess it's neat, but seriously, the "retro" or "old-school graphics" tagline is getting abused by so many devs who don't understand that games back then looked nothing like theirs, or why games back then even looked the way they did. Hardware limitations. Not an easy way to get attention and appeal to "90's gamers".

Like cool, we get it if high-definition 3d games are expensive to make. But at this point, the whole "it looks totally retro dudes you know you like old games" explanation isn't cutting it anymore. It's done to death.

That and most of the spritework in those games almost always looks like ass and something that would embarrass even the shoddiest of SNES games. I'm looking at you, Terraria and Starbound.

I personally like the way terraria looks, but hey to each his own! I haven't been able to take too deep a look at this, but the little I have seen I like.

[Absolute Zero]

Doom has better graphics than terraria, minecraft and starbound together, yo. If only Doom had cell-shading in it's sprites at this point, I think it would look awesome.

Hell, look at warsow!

[Slim]

Doom has better graphics than terraria, minecraft and potatobound together, yo.

That's because Terraria and Minecraft intentionally go for those graphic styles. Doom was using very limited hardware at the time, so they took what they had and made it. And yes compared, Doom's textures have more detail than Minecraft's does. Terraria goes back to the 16-bit like graphics that were on older home consoles at the time (SNES and Genesis), albeit some fancy rendering for some objects.

[Radix]

Bloody hell, I hate how a "selling point" of so many games these days is "Hey old gamers it's retro! Look at these cubes and squares everywhere, 32x32 textures on daikatana models and faux-commodore music! Just like your old favourites!".

Aside from that I guess it's neat, but seriously, the "retro" or "old-school graphics" tagline is getting abused by so many devs who don't understand that games back then looked nothing like theirs, or why games back then even looked the way they did. Hardware limitations. Not an easy way to get attention and appeal to "90's gamers".

Like cool, we get it if high-definition 3d games are expensive to make. But at this point, the whole "it looks totally retro dudes you know you like old games" explanation isn't cutting it anymore. It's done to death.

That and most of the spritework in those games almost always looks like ass and something that would embarrass even the shoddiest of SNES games. I'm looking at you, Terraria and Starbound.

I strongly agree with you, so I'm sorry you feel that the game is guilty of this. We worked hard to get the graphical style right and I've tried to impress on the artists that "retro" should actually mean authentic to what people did under actual hardware constraints--it just comes out looking better if you keep this in mind--and have occasionally had to argue down cases where someone wanted to do something nonsensical like alpha blending on a texture animated with palette swaps. I only recently acquiesced on having any alpha-blended effects in the game at all, to streamline how weapon effects are done. It's been flattering to see people in a couple of places mention Gunscape as an example of how it should be done in reference to games with a less-deliberate retro style.

That said it's an ongoing project in early pre-alpha which contains some WIP and placeholder art, and it's a sandboxy game so there's no way to control how players combine elements, and we're a small studio with practical constraints that limit just how much of a perfectionist I can be with this shit. Still, I thought you oughta know that it's not something that's been done carelessly, and you might even change your mind of you played around in the demo a bit (some of the videos are kinda dark and muddy). I should probably also point out that it was never intended to be a "selling point" or formulated from a marketing perspective--the look of the game grew organically out of a prototype that used Wolf3D textures as placeholders.

[Medicris]

I really appreciate you coming here to say that. I really do.

The rant was more about the general state of a lot of indie games after the first paragraph, towards the trend of making simplistic half-assed artwork and say "it's not lazy, it's retro style lol". From the trailer, to me, it did come across as a marketing stance since I've seen games flaunting their "classic/retro" looks before. Still, I love the idea you're doing in general.

I realize that it's in pre-alpha and not to be taken as a final product. Personally it was just little things, like the difference of music age in the trailer (80's chiptune) to graphical age (somewhere between Quake 1/2) and the explosion effects. It seemed like it kind of tried to imitate a game from the time but didn't care to see what they were like, and saying "oh yeah we loved Doom/Wolfenstein/etc!". Mostly just because I've seen that kind of dishonesty from devs before (I'm concerned about Doom 4 for the same reasons), but I'm happy to see the stylistic choice wasn't just done to take advantage of nostalgia.

That said, it's just one guy's nerd rant on indie games. I've just messed around in the demo and I love it. EDIT: In the video the explosions just looked like flat spinning orange squares, but they look much better ingame. Pardon that, sorry.

[Radix]

Yeah, both myself and the art director hate the original minecraft style and in particular the way people mindlessly imitate it, so between that and my less specific disgust with garbage retro-styled games we're doing our best. But it's kind of dangerous territory to be in regardless because people are rightfully sick of lazy art. As we aren't aiming to emulate any particular game, one of the primary goals was to develop a look that will support all of the theme packs we're planning, which include content inspired by games spanning a pretty broad time period that needs to all mesh visually. The music isn't something I have any control over but I really like what we have (and OMF had music by Kenny Chou in 1994; I can't think of any FPS games that used obviously non-midi tracker music but I feel pretty okay about it time period-wise).

I think you definitely had a point with the weapon effects/explosions, they're WIP for sure and will probably go through a couple more iterations. They're being overhauled atm in fact (and the new versions probably won't be final either).

And hey, thanks a lot for trying out the demo!

[Miruku]

It looks like Half-Life 1 running in software mode. I've always liked the look of software mode, so I'm into that.