MEMBRANE - Commercial Alien Shooter made in GZDoom

Back it on IndieGoGo! | Indie DB | Website | Watch the Promotional Video!

Membrane is a retro-ish shooter being developed in the GZDoom engine. Featuring fast gameplay, expansive levels, and fun sci fi weapons and powers.  In it, you play as an alien abductee who has been implanted with a highly adaptive life form, the "Membrane", as part of an experiment gone right... Or perhaps horribly wrong!  Fight your way across 5 massive maps, solve puzzles, and develop an arsenal of weapons and adaptations to terrorize the army of little green men in this twisted take on the Retro-Shooter genre.

A 2 map tech demo has been released, and is available on Indie DB.  We expect the game to be much longer and more impressive than that, but we just wanted to give everyone a feel for what we have so far.

We've just launched our crowdfunding campaign on IndieGoGo to try and get more seed-capital for this, as working on this is very time consuming and takes some more powerful hardware and software to develop effectively. (seriously, GZDB was running at 10FPS on my old computer by the time I upgraded)  If anyone is interested in buying and playing this game, you can do so now, through our IndieGoGo, and you'll be first in line with a copy by the time it's fully released!  It's $15 to pre-order for release, and $20 to get early-access to development builds, which we think is a relatively low price compared to other games of this caliber, but you have to buy while the campaign is in progress.  There are some other goodies for people who want to throw down more, like a physical copy for $50 and a model of yourself in the game for $200, so if any of that interests you, you oughtta do that before the campaign ends!

SELECTED SCREENSHOTS

Go check out our IndieGoGo Page and ZDoom Forums Thread for more details!

I always love seeing new indie FPS titles, especially ones made in what's essentially the Doom engine since it's seemingly rare. Consider me intrigued.

Looks very promising! I wish you good luck with your project, and of course I will wait for the release.

8 hours ago, MFG38 said:

I always love seeing new indie FPS titles, especially ones made in what's essentially the Doom engine since it's seemingly rare. Consider me intrigued.

Yeah, we plan on using pretty much every feature and facet of GZDoom to make this look pretty much like a modern game, but we'd also like to see people making maps and mods for this like they do with the 90s games like Chex Quest and HACX.

7 hours ago, StormCatcher.77 said:

Looks very promising! I wish you good luck with your project, and of course I will wait for the release.

Have you tried the demo we just put out? :3

And you know if you give us money you don't have to wait for the release, right? :P

This is cool! I'm downloading the demo right now. I'll keep an eye on this, although I'm not interested in pre-ordering it.

@RockstarRaccoon I'm confused, you say "we" and "us", but I only see one developer on the IndieGoGo page.

okay I had a look at all the pictures and watched the featured video. based on everything I've seen this is not worth your asking prices. honestly this is something I can crank out for free on a bad month. I'm not hating because I love creativity... However you really need to adjust your prices.

I'm honestly not convinced either. When you have awesome projects such as Golden Souls, Blade Of Agony, Struggle: Antaresian Legacy and many, many more released for free over all the years that Doom community been around, paying for what looks like an underwhelming shooter, that are, let's be honest, dime a dozen on Steam right now, seem a little bit excessive.

On 7/3/2018 at 4:34 AM, Edward850 said:

@RockstarRaccoon I'm confused, you say "we" and "us", but I only see one developer on the IndieGoGo page.

Looks like a typo to me... Thanks for catching it.

On 7/3/2018 at 9:41 AM, Ermi said:

okay I had a look at all the pictures and watched the featured video. based on everything I've seen this is not worth your asking prices. honestly this is something I can crank out for free on a bad month. I'm not hating because I love creativity... However you really need to adjust your prices.

Well, let's keep in mind that this is all Alpha footage, but that's true.  There are plenty of really cool things in the community just like this that you can get for free.  We're hoping to be different enough from them, through both the weirdness of the setting and the polish of the final product.  We've talked about the pricing scheme, but that's really Don's call, so I'm not really the person to be talking to about that...

On 7/3/2018 at 10:02 AM, Wanderer said:

I'm honestly not convinced either. When you have awesome projects such as Golden Souls, Blade Of Agony, Struggle: Antaresian Legacy and many, many more released for free over all the years that Doom community been around, paying for what looks like an underwhelming shooter, that are, let's be honest, dime a dozen on Steam right now, seem a little bit excessive.

Actually, we're trying to differentiate from the pile of lackluster "retro shooters" on Steam by looking at what they're doing and trying to do things which will stand out as different.  Many of them seem to rely on tossing a bunch of enemies at the player in relatively straight-forward maps, which is actually NOT 90s design, but post-COD "hallway" design.  These are going to follow more of the "adventure" style that Doom or Hexen had.

37 minutes ago, RockstarRaccoon said:

Looks like a typo to me... Thanks for catching it.

It's not a typo. You were listed there a couple days ago.

You were then removed, which I assume was because of how you handled the topic on ZDoom.

1 hour ago, RockstarRaccoon said:

Well, let's keep in mind that this is all Alpha footage

Im not convinced.

Tell don to sort his shit out, these prices are ridiculous.
"$15 to pre-order for release" < not necessary atall.
"$20 to get early-access to development builds" < extra money grabbing. for this much i can buy a properly developed game.
"which we think is a relatively low price compared to other games of this caliber" < like what? have you played any of my FREE total conversions? 
Hidden here is a list of videos which show some footage of gameplay from a mod i recently made for free which offers more.

"physical copy for $50" < for this much im expecting my shit to be gold plated.
"a model of yourself in the game for $200" < really? pay me $200 and il make the entire game for you.

My point is, Set up a donations, and if people are interested they will pay. simple.

EDIT : by the way i went to his indiegogo page and i saw this...
"Has been developing the initial designs of Membrane for several years."
This is what several years of work looks like...

i also made solace dreams and SURVIVE in a single year, 6months each roughly on my own with minor outside help. So for several years of work im expecting ALOT, seriously!

2 hours ago, TerminusEst13 said:

 

It's not a typo. You were listed there a couple days ago.

 

"10 years experience with doombuilder mapping"? I can't say I know every map that gets released, but I'm not sure I've seen 10 years worth of maps from RockstarRacoon. Some searching reveals that he did no mapping for any of his alleged projects (with Hedon even being nothing more than "answered some questions"?). And I can't find anything he has released, which mathematically means he's had infinitely less output than claimed.

Something smells fishy here.

I remember playing a demo of this a while ago; was fun and showed potential. Prolly won't be paying for it but I am interested to see it's development; Don's work is impressive. I hope this recent stuff gets sorted out.

I played the original demo, I thought it was interesting and I'll probably play the new demo as well.

SuperDon clearly has talent and I would actually be happy to support him, but after reading your posts I don't think it would be a sound investment, I personally don't believe you are going todo anything apart from take peoples money. 

18 hours ago, Liberation said:

SuperDon clearly has talent and I would actually be happy to support him, but after reading your posts I don't think it would be a sound investment, I personally don't believe you are going todo anything apart from take peoples money. 

If you think it's a scam, don't spend money on it. No one needs to. Other people will, and they will probably be happy with what they get.

21 hours ago, Ermi said:

Tell don to sort his shit out, these prices are ridiculous.

They aren't that ridiculous for what they are.  $15 - $20 is about what a game of this type normally costs on Steam, maybe on the high end of that, but nowhere near as much as, say, a more A-list game.  I don't disagree that they're on the high side, but we do fully intend to give people something worth that amount of money.

21 hours ago, Ermi said:

"Has been developing the initial designs of Membrane for several years."

Keep in mind, this is a game with almost entirely original assets, with bone animated models and high resolution textures, and none of the enemies, items, or landscapes are supposed to resemble anything on Earth.  Don has been working on the designs and models in his spare time since before that first demo came out.  There is a lot of content here, and you've only really seen what is in a usable state.

Anyway, sorry I haven't been too responsive, I'm actually working on setting up releases for a couple projects I had to put on hold for this.

If you think it's a scam, don't spend money on it. No one needs to. Other people will

"If you think it's a scam, don't spend money on it. Other people will fall for it"

Obviously, this is not a scam. Personally, I do believe Raccoon's honest intentions. Unless building a mediocre FPS for eight people on a sum of 200 bucks can count as a scam.

It's the question of OP's ability to deliver with no proof of previous work. Given the quality of provided demo with plain and blank level design, limp animations, and weak sound design one would be better spending their money on something like Dusk, Amid Evil or Ion Maiden. They cost pretty much the same, but actually come from the developers with prior experience, and even if they are not yet finished, they are already incredibly fun to play.

I personally don't think its a scam as such, SuperDon has expressed how the money will be spent and I appreciate that, however its you who I believe is the scammer. You get $1000 for a new computer and I don't think you will do anything level wise and will just disappear. 

I'm speechless at the poor PR and the info that led to RR being removed from the project that was discussed on the ZDoom forums. I mean fuck, even I have a bigger resume than our fine furry friend here.

Shouldn't the post have been started by SuperDon instead?

SuperDon posted a thread for this over two years ago. That one probably could have been bumped and updated by him.

15 hours ago, RockstarRaccoon said:

Keep in mind, this is a game with almost entirely original assets, with bone animated models and high resolution textures, and none of the enemies, items, or landscapes are supposed to resemble anything on Earth. 

If you took a moment to actually look at Ermi's work you'd very quickly realise how ridiculous this part of your reply is, as it doesn't counter the argument at all.

Good luck to SuperDon on this project, I hope he can grow the team with people who know how to make the project seem more enticing.

So @RockstarRaccoon, you're better off trying to make your own maps and attempting to try to fix your own reputation instead of piggybacking off of other people's successful projects.