Blake Hawk: Cyber Saboteur

Everything I have about it so far can be found here: http://pastebin.com/rYMyBnbA

One of my dream games, and I feel that this one may be plausible on some scale if I can decide what engine to build it on. I know a good amateur artist/programmer who aspires to become a game designer himself, and I'm hoping either of our projects will be able to get off the ground sooner or later.

I am posting this here to hear opinions and suggestions regarding the story and gameplay, as the majority of both are in a tentative state right now, and if I am going to go through with this I should start on the right foot. Fire away!

Sounds like Reboot or something. I would suggest that making depletable ammo a feature on some of the harder settings. Oh, and have the gatling gun actually fire at a rate of at least 100 rounds a second.

The gatling gun can already down another player with just one second of sustained fire at full spin, and it would chew up ammo far too quickly. And I don't know what you mean by depletable ammo.

Maybe he means one-time ammo pickups, a la Doom and Half Life.

Also, when the detonation point is activated, that triggers a large encounter and the player has to hold off until it detonates, am I correct?

edited 5th Oct '11 9:07:18 PM by RocketDude

Yes, all the items are one-time pickups in the campaign.

A detonation point can be seen as a checkpoint that the player has to press a key to trigger when he's ready. Once that is done, the bomb is set and the encounter begins. I was thinking that all the charges would be detonated by remote upon reaching the level's exit, but on the other hand it could make sense if, after all enemies were defeated, the bomb would detonate via remote and the explosion would cause the path to the next point to become available.

Yeah, I like that idea.

Of course, no action hero is complete without witty one-liners: http://pastebin.com/zsTd9HYu

I'll be adding more as I can think of them, as well as level-specific ones when that comes around.

Updated the main document with a list of campaign maps. Tentative, sure, but I don't plan for there to be any more than 24 levels and 6 bosses. The body count of all the levels combined will probably be at least 5000.

I will be writing descriptions of each map in a future update. Each level should introduce at least one new enemy type.

Updated again. Now with 20% more achievements!

The groups of maps are supposed to have a common theme, right?

Somewhat. I came up with a bunch of locales that I thought would make for interesting maps and then grouped them together.

I assume the transitions make sense in context?

That's what I'm planning. Each level represents some facet of the government and how it operates. For example, the restaurant stage is part of the Ministry of Plenty, which rations out the food supplies to citizens. The front of the restaurant would reflect how much choice civilians have (which is to say there is none), and the level progresses into the kitchens to see just what the party is feeding its people behind the scenes.

http://pastebin.com/3mLSeTJT Here I have started to write out my ideas for enemies and descriptions of the maps.

If you haven't noticed, the two games I've drawn the most inspiration from are Pain Killer and Serious Sam. Both games feature a lot of mechanics found in old-school FP Ses such as no limit to how many weapons you can carry and no having to reload your guns, both of which are useful because you're up against scores of enemies at every encounter. You also recover your health from item pickups rather than the regenerating shields that seem to be so popular in today's shooters, so between encounters there are lots of secret areas full of goodies that will help you out, giving an element of exploration instead of becoming a corridor shooter.

I have also drawn upon elements that are in one game but not the other. Serious Sam actually has a score counter that rewards you for finding secrets and playing on higher difficulty settings. I wanted to expand upon this by also rewarding the player for getting multiple kills in quick succession, so doing so would raise the score multiplier, and the player could replay individual levels for higher scores and better medals by playing offensively.

Health recovery was always an issue with FP Ses, and I imagine the reason that today's shooters go with regenerating health was to ensure that players would start each fight in peak condition, and design their levels around that. Pain Killer used the traditional health-pickups method, but with some new twists. First, every enemy corpse would leave behind a soul that could be picked up for a small amount of health, and collecting enough of them would activate a certain powerup. Second, your health is restored to full at each and every checkpoint, and checkpoints are placed frequently between encounters. This ensures that the player will start combat at full health, as the encounter is intended, and killing enemies rather than hiding behind cover to restore health encourages a more frantic, offensive playstyle suited for the fast pace of a shooter. However, the enemy souls cannot be collected until the corpse fades away, and the souls don't stay on the battlefield for very long before disappearing, so the player has to do a lot of standing near the corpse of the enemy he last killed, waiting for the soul to appear. I decided it would make more sense to simply give the player that bit of health as soon as the enemy dropped dead. The only other game I can think of that did this right was Duke Nukem Manhattan Project. All in all, I think that when playing aggressively against a horde of enemies, knowing that killing them quickly will improve both your health and your score (in a game where the points DO matter) would be a good way to reinforce this behavior.

Then there was the issue of weapons that I thought carefully about. In Serious Sam, you have over a dozen weapons that are interestingly grouped together in pairs based on function. You might remember in Quake how you had a shotgun and super shotgun, or a nailgun and super nailgun, or a grenade launcher and rocket launcher. Serious Sam follows suit: Two melee weapons, two handguns, two shotguns, two automatics, and two explosives launchers. In Pain Killer, you only have five weapons, but each has two modes of fire, and they manage to pack the standard FPS weapon assortment into this small arsenal in interesting ways, such as having the same gun shoot bullets and rockets depending on the button you press. Inspired, I decided to combine Sam's weapon pairs with Pain Killer's dual-purpose guns, so the shotgun can fire one (regular shotgun) or two (super shotgun) shells at a time, and the gatling gun's barrels can spin slowly (machine gun) or quickly (minigun) and so on to not make the weapons redundant.

I'm starting to wonder if someone else hasn't thought of these things already. Isn't there a market, however niche it may be, for arcade-style twitch shooters?

Dunno about arcade-style, but twitch gameplay does have some degree of popularity.

Also, some of these enemies are kinda clever, like the Director who buffs nearby enemies.

edited 20th Oct '11 5:04:22 PM by RocketDude

Thanks for the feedback. I've now added info for the second set of maps.

I have four documents pertaining to this right now. Would it be better if it was just a single huge one instead?

Nah, break it up.

Dammit, I was writing up the third set when suddenly the window had to refresh, and everything I was going to add is gone! Isn't there a way to get it back in the Paste editor!?

Does it save a draft?

If not, then yeah, you gotta write it all back up from memory.

There, I was finally able to get the third part up. See for yourself: http://pastebin.com/3mLSeTJT

An idea, as silly as it might seem in the context of the setting:

There are things like the SWAT and Thug enemies and the Alien and Space Marine enemies. Logically, these guys would also fight each other. Could you have that happen in the context of the story?

Possibly, I'm not sure yet. If enemies kill each other, would they rob the player of their points? A player going for a better score might get frustrated at this unless you were given points for getting enemies to kill each other.

I guess you could have the player be rewarded in some way for making enemies kill each other.

So, do enemies drop ammo, health and other supplies? You could make them drop extra goodies when they kill each other in lieu of points.