Games Vacuum Gap (First Person Shooter Project)

Hi all! I've been working off and on as a solo developer on a first person shooter since mid 2013, and have just today made the first public upload of a WIP build. It's a FPS with RPG elements heavily inspired by the original Deus Ex, as well as other games of the era. It's temporarily titled y2K but that will change.

Here's a link to the current build.

I also have a website for it: https://gobuildstuff.com/vacuumgap.html


As a solo developer, I make everything myself: models, scripts, textures, sounds, design, story, music, voices, etc. No free assets or libraries that don't come with the software. It was made almost entirely using free software, the only exception being Reaper for sound editing. Here are a few screenshots of some environments.






Hope you enjoy! I'd love feedback, especially on mechanics. The current levels are not intended to be in the final game, so while I definitely appreciate feedback on their design, they probably won't be adjusted that much.

 

Thanks for the recommendation! I think even Audacity would be perfectly fine for the sounds I've made for this game, the problem is Reaper is just too easy to use . But I always like trying new software.

Thanks also for the feedback! Next on the list is AI improvements, while continuing to flesh out the story on paper. These demo levels helped solidify the scope I can achieve, and show which mechanics simply did not work. Graphics probably won't be improved much. I'm not a great artist, so it would be a very high time cost without no benefit to core functionality. At some point I'll unlock higher resolutions (it's 720p right now), since that's mainly a question of setting up the UI to scale properly.

With luck, I'll start creating the actual game levels sometime around the end of the month.

 

Hi KnightsFan. I'm afraid everything fell apart for me when I started the game. The Development Console came up with a load of prefab errors - e.g. "SpawnCharacter for TobeySpawn isn't working because the prefab is empty", then some null exceptions ("Object reference not set to an instance of an object").

Aside from that, I think there a couple of tidy-ups on the menus which would be quick-wins. When I used a controller to navigate the menus, it was very difficult to see what was selected (it was just a very slightly different shade of grey) - this will simply be down to colour choice on your UI buttons. Also, when changing quality settings, there was no feedback after you click any of the buttons. Finally, I'm not sure what "press space to start" really adds, since I've already selected to start the game on the main menu.

If you can sort out the main issue though, I'd be happy to provide constructive feedback on game mechanics.

 

Thanks so much for the feedback! I found and fixed the issue producing the errors(bizarre typo that worked in very specific conditions--naturally, the exact conditions I tested haha). Here's the new one: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5e05m4aa7erd9pv/y2K_2020.01.04.zip?dl=1

You will have a bad time using a controller. It likely will be impossible to do some things, and it certainly hasn't been tested. The "Press space to start" originated when it took 20-30 seconds to load a scene. Now it's near instantaneous, so that should probably be removed, you're right.

UI really has been an afterthought for when people started testing it. Up until pretty recently, it was just "get something in place that worked no matter how complex." So feedback in terms of what to streamline, what is confusing, which colors don't work, will help a lot. I need to add sounds to the menu, and a confirmation for quality change.

If you do end up trying it again, there are logs in the "y2K_Data/Logs" folder, sending those might be an easy way to describe problems.

Thanks!

 

New version today: https://www.dropbox.com/s/2lvc2d69gucuiaj/y2K_2020.01.26.zip?dl=1

I'd include updated screenshots, but nothing has changed graphically. Go ahead and give it a run through and let me know what needs to be improved!



Over the past few weeks I've mainly worked on the bot code. Most of the changes are under the hood. Overall, I eliminated ~20KB of code for roughly the same behavior, while cleaning up several bugs that resulted in frozen bots. Saving/loading became a lot more stable, though it still needs quite a bit of work. After that, I redid the attack routines and they work much better now, with bots taking cover much more smoothly.

One issue with bots is that they are lazer-accurate if you are standing still, so difficulty could be a little higher than expected. There are console cheats in the readme if you want to explore without getting interrupted.

On the creative side, I also spent some time outlining the story in a more organized fashion, and am about ready to start prototyping the first story level.

Next on the list is that first level prototype, along with some minor HUD improvements, and a lot of work on animations which are very rudimentary. All animations are (and will continue to be) IK driven.

 

Progress is always slower than I hope, but I've been plugging away. I've finally settled on a title, Vacuum Gap.

Recently I've been working on making the animations better and more flexible, which is mostly done. Since I was redoing things anyway, I started using a different rig, which means I need to update that rig across all character models. There are a number of little improvements I can do now, such as procedurally animating mouths when character speak, and actual finger movements.

Meanwhile, I've started working on a new level. Here are some early screenshots.





Any feedback is of course appreciated! There's a download link to the latest stable version in the first post.