Hive 'n' Guns # Roguelike'ish scifi FPS

Hello all!

I and my good friend @chelnok would like to introduce our new project Hive 'n' Guns.

Features:

# FPS
# Procedurally generated levels. That means levels, not just a bunch of rooms stacked together.
# Comes with permadeath
# Narrative only in video game language (no cinematics or clumsy cutscenes, no walls of text). Heavy emphasis on player stories. While you have health left, we will not take over the controls, ever.
# PlayerSkill based gameplay, hard as hell, unforgiving, no hand-holding. Your call – your fall
# Scifi setting
# Monsters and gore. Yes, bosses too.
# Guns and equipment
# Hive*

Hive 'n' Guns has been in development for 6-8 months. Currently in prototype version. We spent last spring by testing various concepts and procedurality is something we really like to play with. Couple of months of development we used on pre-production and design to clarify (to ourselves) that we can really pull this off.

Here's couple of early in-game shots:




Design focus
Set ourselves constraints. The more the merrier. In the past we've had our share of HugeMapMMO-syndroma (WoW meets DayZ, only with ecosystem, bigger maps, crafting and…). Gotta face it, we're a team of two, scale needs to be set right. This doesn't mean we need to do an infi-runner (actually, we've done it, it's just to keep us on the track.

We're trying to concentrate on what's important. Only that. We have a mental three-point greenlight system for every feature that's going to get in the game. These three being: 1) Action, 2) Scifi, 3) Sense of Thriller/Horror. If a feature doesn't add to all of these, it's out.

Narrative
We have a background story, we just won't share it with you. Yes, there are going to be clues in the environment, but you shouldn't be expecting a clear explanation on anything.

Here's the thing when you start playing: You are alone, you have a gun, you don't know which way is the exit, you don't know why you're here or what is in this place. Luckily you don't have time to ponder it over too much, at any second now, you're being attacked by all sorts of nasty scifi monsters.

And that's basically how we want it to play out. Click start and you're at it. Mess up, swear you'll never play again, get back to work or whatever. Repeat another day / night (recommended).

Release and pricing
What we've planned (and we'd love to hear what you guys make of it) is:

We build the game including all the core features as polished as possible. No Greenlight or Indiegogo -campaigns at this point. We are releasing the game for free. We're aiming for a small (content wise) but re-playable game. If it finds its players, then we'll push for Steam and add a ton of content and a price tag. We are kinda cautious with Early Access stuff nowdays, so we thought to do this in a more of an iD way (Doom and Wolfenstein sharewarims kind of a thing).

The star (*) in the feature list means you can't get to the hive on this version

About us
We have a respectable failure resume of games we could not complete. MMO's and stuff We've released some silly flash games, which you can find here and here. We've also released (for free in Desura) a cool but I guess, kinda weird local multiplayer only game, which you can find here.

All in all, we've been making (=learning to make) games together for about five years now, still feel great about it and thinking once again: This game's gonna be sooo coool!

I'm the project idea guy who actually models and does whatever needed to execute those ideas. Chelnok is the guy who makes it all work technically. We don't wear titles and we don't have a formal GDD. We work hard and love what we are doing.

We'll be updating this thread with more info and stuff about Hive 'n' Guns.

And, a word of wisdom, probably needless to say (to you guys on this forum), everything is subject to change until release

 

Looks good. Love the concept. Will defiantly keep an eye on the thread. Good luck guys!

 

@MJNuchia

Thanks a lot! Glad you're interested.

I checked out your WIP. Crazy looking game Keep it up!

 

Thanks

 

Nice, your level generation is looking pretty good (I'm a sucker for pcg).

 

Looks good, especially for a two-man effort. I will keep an eye on this because I have been working (and still am sporadically) on a remake of 1993's Hired Guns, the result looks similar to what you have achieved. I took a break from it because I had to learn implementing navmeshes in a voxel-based, constantly changing world, and also how to write my own serializer to save maps because Unity Serializer bugged out too many times I hope you will complete this project.

 

"We have a background story, we just won't share it with you."

Sure you do. (sarcasm)

 

Stop. Writing a backstory isn't impossible or extremely difficult.

 

I know. It's not impossible or extremely difficult. I've written a few screenplays, short films, rewrote an indie game developer's story treatment and was probably one of the best scriptwriters in my Screenwriting class in college!

 

@XGundam05
Thanks, we'll do a short write-up about the level generation once @chelnok is done with it. He's still working on "the minor things"

@Cherno
Whoo! Hired Guns! I spent hundreds of hours on that gem back in the Amiga days. We used to play 4-player "deathmatches". To prevent us from seeing the other players "screens" (the monitor was split-screened in four tiny portions) we used duct tape, pieces of cardboard and books. To make our "sight prevention system" work vertically, two of the players would have to sit on floor and the other two with joysticks would have sit as high as they could. Hah! Now that's hardcore Lovely times.

Please post your progress on WIP forums. I would be interested.

 

If you are interested, you can follow the whole development process and the last version of the editor here:

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=68014&page=14

 

@Cherno

Great! I'll go through the thread. I just need my brains back online before doing so. I've spent the day on tedious animation / rig -tweaking on this guy:

 

Cool , a colostomy gun !

 

Well thank you sir! That's exactly what we are going to call it (internally) from now on!

You know what they say about great artists and stealing stuff

 

Great another super hard game to make up for the lack of fun gameplay. Just like every "popular" game these days. Sprinkle that with permadeath and bam, a short boring game filled with crap content that lasts 10 min. I also expect to pay $20 for this I assume?

 

@calmcarrots hard games aren't a recent development, look at some of the most popular SNES titles (Super Metroid, Megaman, etc). They were all incredibly difficult. Its a recent thing for games to hold the player's hand and give them everything on a plate.

@peon The game is looking really good, I'm interested in the procedural generation aspect how are you going to make it more interesting than just stringing a series of rooms together? The art for the large fellow a few posts above looks really awesome, love that style of textures. Going to be keeping an eye open for some progress reports on this thats for sure.

 

@Chambers

What we are trying to do with the proc gen is to widen it from being a plain geometry creator. We are making it to take into account the player actions and play style and to generate content based on that information.

We are implementing basic game design theories (like risk-reward schemes, pacing, flow-channel, etc) to our level generation. Another thing we're trying to solve is how to stick some arc of drama in proc gen.

We're keeping in mind that a level is more than it's geometry. For example, we are toying with dynamic ambient audio (kind of guessing how the player might be feeling and playing audio that amplifies that ”feel”). Repetition is one of the big challenges in rogulikes (design), we are trying to tackle this one by measuring the overall progress of player and changing the first levels with that info. For example, after player has reached level 7, it is possible for super-run-buff to spawn in levels 1 and 2 (which makes the levels fast and easy to complete). So it's all pretty basic game design, only that it's applied to proc gen.

To achieve this technically we have created a Dungeon Master class. It's a class that orchestrates all, kind of a dynamic game designer. Keeps track of player actions, throws the dice and spawns stuff accordingly.

I could go on all day about this, there's a universes of stuff into it, but I'll try to keep it short.

Hope this makes some sense to you

 

Hey all!

Here are some things we've done lately:

Added props, particles, worked on textures, played a bit with shaders and lighting, etc..
This is how the game looks at the moment:


Level generator generates stuff like this now:


The rooms are made of few pieces that fit together. The pieces have variations of props and scifi things.
Here's some shots of room variations (I'm standing still and pressing randomize-this-room-debug-button):


Oh, and @chelnok has started work on AI (wooHoo! We get to play for real soon!):


More stuff later.

 

Working with corridors.

 

Looks pretty nice. Are these going to be the final graphics or are you going to be doing a fair amount of polishing. (Don't care if you don't polish up the graphics, just asking. )

 

@Neffy

Thanks for commenting. It's still needs polish and tweaks but we're getting close to the quality we're after here (the corridor pics).

Honestly, I could polish this for the rest of the year But I got to move on to other assets soon.

 

Okay, that's awesome! But if you don't mind an unknown developer giving you some pointers, in the corridors, I'd make the ventilation ducts more rounded out. It looks quite awkward sitting up there. I mean it looks good, don't get me wrong, but that's a bit of polish that'd be nice to see in the final product.

 

@Neffy

Don't mind at all That's why I posted it. It's added to "to be considerated" -section on ToDo -list

Thanks a lot for your feedback.

 

Okay cool. Once again, obviously you don't HAVE to listen to me but modeling it out would just be a few more edge loops and some edge pulling. Nothing too major ha.