My design document for a free software homage to the Titanfall series.
2016's Titanfall 2 is one of the few recent AAA games I have any lasting passion around.
because of the parkour mechanics (wallrunning, double jumping, sliding, grappling hooks) the combat feels more open-ended and even-handed compared to in most other multiplayer FPS games.
the other signature feature of the Titanfall series is that the player can call in a giant humanoid robot after getting a certain amount of kills (some of them even have swords for living out your anime space samurai fantasies).
sadly the multiplayer is bound to a central set of servers and you need a hefty GPU to render the detailed yet lifeless environments* (rendering it unplayable on most laptops)
[* I'll be frank and say that most game worlds after the PS2 era look like wax dolls]
the Northstar modlauncher provides a method for running independent game servers and custom maps, but creating your own Stuff for it (characters, weapons, etc.) still requires actual CAD knowledge and probably involves wrestling with a badly documented proprietary game engine.
As much as I respect Scott Ross's "Stop Killing Games" movement, I still think people should be far more aggressive about making free, heavily modifyable recreations of their favorite videogames: and ZDoom might be the perfect canvas for that sort of thing. (as far as action games are concerned)
- uses sprites for game objects and glorified vector drawings for map geometry
- game logic is defined in a powerful scripting language called ZScript (there's also a bytecode language called ACS that has some unique features, but I've never touched it )
- decades of user-created levels, monsters and weapons
- can run on any electronic device from the last 20+ years
- players can host their own multiplayer servers
the point is that Doom is a really good game to begin with, I like playing within the limitations of mid-1990s FPSes, and that the game engine getting open source'd back in 1997 quickly became a massive boon for its already thriving modding scene.
my project will mainly focus on singleplayer, but there are deathmatch bots good enough that I could probably expand to multiplayer without having to call up a .
porting it to Luanti** (formerly Minetest) or one of the Quake games would probably be more practical (and faithful), but I don't feel like relearning the basics right now.
(the Godot engine seems to mostly be a middleware for commercially published indie games than any kind of open-ended platform)
[**a Minecraft clone might seem like an odd choice for a FPS game centered around smooth movement, but the engine does support angled blocks]
if I end up with something playable, I'll announce it on my Fediverse account (will probably pin said post for the sake of posterity).
- copy doublejump and wallrunning from ZMovement (with credit, of course)
- might make the player character a head shorter, to make the player feel faster and make the the tall monsters (Revenants, Barons of Hell) come off as even larger
(I figure it'll be less invasive than making the large enemies bigger)
- because this is more of a homage to the Titanfall series than a straight-up recreation/demake, I probably won't use regenerative health.
- all enemies that do melee attacks are reconfigured to deal instant-kill melee damage (just like Titanfall)
- most human-scale characters get one-hit-killed by melee attacks (replace berserks with big medkits)
start by tweaking Doom weapons, if necessary
I won't implement anything that requires freelook (most grenade launchers, Skulltag's railgun), since that would render the game unplayable on keyboard-only setups
(one of the reasons I like Doom is that I can reasonably play it on computers that don't have mice, trackpoints or other suitable analog pointing devices)the Titans will replace certain powerups: most likely the invisibility and invulnerability orbs along with the radiation suits.
will probably copy the vehicle code from Ashes 2063 to get them going.
titans will most likely be represented by enemies from Strife.
will most likely use the Acolytes (slightly sci-fi knights) alongside the actual giant robots: as I'm going for more humanoid, anime-esque robot designs rather than the utilitarian bricks of the original games.
(haven't played this one, but the assets blend well with the Doom artstyle)
most of these will probably be Doom and FreeDoom levels modified to better accomodate wallrunning and titans
will also recreate some of my favorite Titanfall levels as faithfully as possible, within the limits of the original engine (no rooms above rooms, no ramps).
will probably ignore the story, because I'm going for more of a homage than a direct recreation.
(though I might add the banter between Cooper and BT later down the line)
I won't implement anything that requires scripted events, like the time travel mechanic from the lab level.
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