We’re a 2-person indie team who have never released anything before and this will our debut title. A first person boomer shooter with quake style, and Ultrakill like movement. We even use TrenchBroom and some more notorious tools like func_godot to put it all together.
I’m excited to share it with you all, and wanted to get a topic up on the official forums. One of the biggest things is that we’ll have a way for anyone to make custom maps and it’s going to be a blast playing all the custom content.
We’ve got about 10-15 more levels to make but we’re at a point where nearly all enemies are functioning, and just needs a texture pass. A majority of the heavy work has been done and we’re really just dialing in features, textures, and doing lots of polish right now.
One thing specifically that we’ve been doing is actually building this game in a public setting. You can actually see all of our individual commits and insider stuff on our Discord. We even post new videos periodically that don’t touch public YouTube.
It looks and feels pretty great! I like the snappy movement, very Quake, and the exaggerated shotgun jump is fun. I’m wondering about ammo though - am I missing some central mechanic, or is ammo just that scarce?
I didn’t have enough ammo to kill the very first batch of enemies, in the very first level, which seems odd for a shooting game. Shooting is fun! Why limit it so much?
If the idea is being precise enough to kill enemies with one or two shots, get ammo refunds and repeat, I feel like that’s at odds with the fast, act-and-react gameplay. Requiring precision from the player encourages slow, deliberate and cheesy playing. Shothop feels like it should be a game of abundance, where the player isn’t afraid to waste a shot on a shotgun jump.
A lot of the movement part of the game comes from being able to spam bullets. No amount of bullet pickups will be enough to quench the thirst of bullets for the player.
When you start chaining melee kills, with jump shots to ground slams, to air shots from the ground slam. You run out of bullets incredibly fast. The most natural way to rebuild your ammo pool is to restore ammo through charged melee attacks.
What this does is force the player to keep moving.
There’s a very large skill gap between basic play, and high speed play.
Here’s an example of high-speed play from someone in our community.
Ahh, I didn’t realize it’s a time trial game. In that context it makes sense, though I’m still not sure why melee combat is an essential part of that. You say it forces the player to keep moving - so do scattered ammo pickups, fast enemies, and any number of other mechanics.
It’s your game, you should obviously do with it as you wish, but I would add that giving the player what they so thirst for is not a bad thing.
