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Jayextee

SLaVE development thread

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SLaVE, an original game using the good old Doom engine. To be more precise, EDGE 1.35.

(Note: this is in WADs & Mods because, as yet, all the work is simply WAD-based. This will change eventually)



A love-letter to '80s arcade shooting games such as Tempest, Robotron 2084, etc. SLaVE encompasses an age of gaming where the player was the ultimate sitting duck versus hordes of abstract-and-colourful foes in environments only a computer could realise. This is also a love letter to gaming in general, and an answer to the question "what FPS would I personally really love to play?"

I shall be sharing SLaVE's development in this thread:

Developer diaries: one - two - three

Questions for the developer diary are totally welcome, by the way. :)

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Damn son, it's looking sweet shot one reminds me of an AOW 2 level as well. I wish I possessed the graphical skills, motivation and DDF (or coding in general) to come up with such a thing. I am a sucker for vibrant colours and 80's themed things too so I will be keeping an eye on this one. May I ask, is this all done by you? If so I must say that is hugely impressive I remember seeing shots similar to this before. Best of luck for the project by the way.

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Springy said:

May I ask, is this all done by you?


Every last thing except the engine, yes.

And thanks! This kinda started out as a vanity project (to the tune of "I'm going to make the game I want to play!") but since it's started it has seen quite a lot of unexpected (but very welcome) interest. I dare say this is going to be my first foray into indie game making, as I do intend to see how I can distribute this when I'm finished. :)

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There's a little bit of crack and pop from your mic. I've heard running your audio through Audacity and applying some one-click tweaks or filters can help with that.

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My word, this must have taken ages to do due to it being pretty much done by one man. I have to say though that I am very glad that EDGE still gets the odd mod every now and then, they seem a little more frequent now than they used to, (probably thanks to CeeJay and his EDGE mods of last year).

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EDGE probably isn't the best nor the most powerful source port out there, but I adore its little quirks -- such as the lighting being basically a .PNG image mapped with additive translucency to surfaces (think a 'screen' layer type in photoshop), which allowed me to modify it to get that super-cool stylised square lighting.

And to think, I only chose it because it was GPL and I had some experience in modding for it about a decade ago. ;)

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This looks bloody cool. I only noiced one weapon in the video clips, will there be more types or some kind of power ups/collectable things?

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Thanks!

Just the one weapon for now. I will be looking into the idea of power-ups, have something in mind that won't break the balance of the game and still be pretty consistent with the ethos I have going on here. I hardly want this to be a 'pick up big and better guns' type of game. :)

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Somehow I can see this working great with the arcadey "weapon powerup that gives you limited upgraded shots" sort of thing. Could have spread bullets, piercing bullets, explosives, rapidfire, etc... all while maintaining the feel hopefully.

Otherwise, looks pretty great! That square lighting is goofy as hell but pretty awesome. :P

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To be honest, the thing I disliked about this is how the enemies lack outlines or any kind of distinctive highlight, so they easily blend with the environment, among bursts of particles and colored lights. It's also hard to distinguish their dimensions. At least my first watching of your video gave me that impression. Now I think maybe it won't be that bad inside the actual game.

You apparently decided to limit yourself only to a certain kind of engine possibilities (mostly orthogonal box-y architecture, one-color texturing and background). I know you did it to achieve the right "feel". I wish you success in making the effect as immersive as you wanted.

In your Doom maps, you managed to come up with many good ideas how to keep gameplay interesting even if the concept seemed boring on first glance. ("only pistol, no chaingun" gameplay in Nex Credo) I am very curious how you'll keep things interesting in here, because "fighting pixels in a boxy black arena" frankly sounds dull at first glance, too. (Compared to serious Doom mods that heavily take advantage of engine capabilities.) But, I TRUST YOU! ;) Keep up the good work.

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SLaVE is going to be pretty far-removed from Doom gameplay. A lot of what I'm working on is gearing it to be kind neo-arcade gameplay; very scoring-centric, but implemented in (hopefully) new ways.

I won't lie, I'm not too fussed if this alienates people with more modern tastes. ;)

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Well, I won't be able to watch YouTube in a couple of weeks (long story), but from the screenshots you provide, it seems like some kind of mix between Tron and Virus. Did you use any of them as inspiration?

Also, good luck with this. EDGE mods are not as common as they should, so a new one is always welcome.

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looks great. I'm a big fan of shmups and arcade games so naturally I'm hooked by your videos. any info when we might get a first playable version?

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Zed said:

Well, I won't be able to watch YouTube in a couple of weeks (long story), but from the screenshots you provide, it seems like some kind of mix between Tron and Virus. Did you use any of them as inspiration?


Never played Virus (though I will do! Downloaded and may give it a shot tonight), but Tron is definitely an inspiration. Directly in one case; the gradient skies came after watching the film for ideas when other attempts at sky graphics weren't working out due to EDGE not applying the same texture filtering (or lack of, in my desired case) on those as the rest of the graphics.

jmickle66666666 said:

looks really cool! glad to see other full games being made in the doom engine, just so I know I'm not crazy haha


Thank you. To be honest, I don't know why there isn't more of that "LET'S MAKE A GAME!" spirit around here. This community has some amazing talent in music, graphics, mapping and coding -- in all areas far more talented than myself. Imagine what could be done, huh...? :D

Sp00kyFox said:

looks great. I'm a big fan of shmups and arcade games so naturally I'm hookey by your videos. any info when we might get a first playable version?


I have no idea on a first-playable, to be honest. Right now it's in no real state to be seen, since although the game content is fine it still has all the Doom menu graphics and things. Plus there are things I really would like to disable on the code side (saving/loading for one, will replace with a highscore table if I can) meaning that although this is an EDGE 'mod' right now, ideally it will end up an EDGE-based new game.

KiiiYiiiKiiiA said:

I like what is going on here.


Thank you, so very much. :D

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To be honest, I don't know why there isn't more of that "LET'S MAKE A GAME!" spirit around here. This community has some amazing talent in music, graphics, mapping and coding -- in all areas far more talented than myself. Imagine what could be done, huh...? :D


It is puzzling. As grateful as I am for all the free quality content we get, it feels wasteful in a way, to think there's so much talent getting so little exposure.

Which makes it great and interesting to see you going that route.

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Getting a bunch of people to agree on the same thing is probably a problem. The benefit of projects by JXT, Phobus, TV and Scuba Steve is that they can be true to their singular vision

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Being mentioned in the same breath as some of those fellates my ego a bit, I must say. Thanks! Although I'm not about to make any bitches quite yet. ;)

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Pretty cool - loved Robotron and all those other funky looking gems!
Dig the huge pyramid shit in the beginning of dev vid 1... looks like someone's eaten his fiber.

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New enemy plus stage completed during a night of work on the game, plus preparing dev diary 3.

Stuff like this new stage is how I'm keeping it fresh so far; because each stage is an arena unto itself, I can keep them as self-contained challenges. This one is a bunch of fractured slopes that make evading a challenge, as some can be walked up like steps and some need to be jumped up. That's as simple as it gets really, and a gimmick I won't be repeating.

Think of these UFO enemies as rapid-fire weak Cacodemons and we're about there.

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Going back to this...

Zed said:

from the screenshots you provide, it seems like some kind of mix between Tron and Virus. Did you use any of them as inspiration?


Oh god, that training mission. I almost dropped development on SLaVE instantly, the two are so alike. :/

Thankfully, the main game seems to have a different aesthetic and the gameplay is far removed enough from both. Panic over.

In other news, I'm over an eighth toward my target of 100 arenas. Huzzah!

Edit

Fuck it, let's make it worth the bump:



Latest batch of stages.

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Third developer diary, is a quickie runthrough of my process (mainly aimed at non-Doomworlders, I admit) and showcases the recent addition to the family: an as-yet-unnamed UFO enemy.

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Oh god, Smash TV was such an awesome game. I think I'll reward myself (because I kinda begrudge the time the dev diaries take to make, although it may be worth it all when there's about 20 of them) by dusting off the SNES and sticking it on. :D

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I find myself surprisingly charmed by this project, Jay, not least as the result of learning about the heretofore hidden talents of the esteemed Jayextee. Music? Art? Programming? Smash me in the face with a rotted wildebeest carcass, I had no idea! ;D

I really enjoyed the glowing Tron look, takes us back to those thrilling days of Cray supercomputers and Phong rendering. Always thought Tron was one of the coolest things ever. The overall look and the super-colorful sprites in your game are well-matched to that theme. I would play this!

Thumbs-up on the music. I feel like begging you for music now. What I heard is perfect for the kind of high-intensity maps I'm currently planning, which will mostly use faster-paced MOD tracks from demoscene prods. But demo music is intended to be a bit more dramatic, with more parts, than what is perfect for Doom BGM, so music made in that overall style, but specifically as game BGM, is more appropriate.

Speaking of demoscene prods, and in the overall spirit of Trongasming, here's the Farbrausch classic fr-038: theta; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sb3PvD3EUT8

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SteveD said:

I find myself surprisingly charmed by this project, Jay, not least as the result of learning about the heretofore hidden talents of the esteemed Jayextee. Music? Art? Programming? Smash me in the face with a rotted wildebeest carcass, I had no idea! ;D


I think I'll spare you the wildebeest slap, as I'm not much of a programmer; all of what I've done thus far has been DDF scripting, probably closer to pseudo-code than actual code. Maybe.

As for the rest, my entire school time was building up to "I want to make games when I grow up" -- when it came to our GCSE qualifications, I even took music against my teachers' advice because it was simply a hole in my skillset. Drawing, writing, I wanted all corners covered in my pursuit as best I could. Just a shame then, that when I finally took Computer Studies (i.e. programming) at 19, I became homeless midway through and couldn't continue. I don't like to shout about my 'talents', but at the same time am proud of being a multi-discipline artist. ;)

SteveD said:

I really enjoyed the glowing Tron look, takes us back to those thrilling days of Cray supercomputers and Phong rendering. Always thought Tron was one of the coolest things ever. The overall look and the super-colorful sprites in your game are well-matched to that theme. I would play this!


Thanks. I've pretty much been 'into' computers (and games) since the mid '80s and always thought limited palettes had a charm, hence the sticking to the "MSPaint colours" as mentioned in the third development diary video. Tron is totally the biggest inspiration on this game, with old shooters such as BattleZone, Tempest and Robotron 2084. Even the music harks back to old tech in its own way...

SteveD said:

Thumbs-up on the music. I feel like begging you for music now. What I heard is perfect for the kind of high-intensity maps I'm currently planning, which will mostly use faster-paced MOD tracks from demoscene prods. But demo music is intended to be a bit more dramatic, with more parts, than what is perfect for Doom BGM, so music made in that overall style, but specifically as game BGM, is more appropriate.


...speaking of MOD tracks, I tend to prefer the overall tracker format having been an Amiga user for a while in the late '90s. What I use to compose with is ModPlug Tracker, usually quite sample and riff-based for this project -- I'm capable of more melodic work, but the overall soundscape of this project doesn't call for anything too complicated lest the melody and sound effects compete with each other for attention, hence there's a lot of focus on basslines and percussion. I would feel very self-conscious about writing music for someone else though, as the idiom 'jack of all trades, master of none' applies to me. I couldn't possibly hold a candle to what some of the musicians here at Doomworld create, even if it's a good fit for my own project.

As a footnote, I recently found out that the mighty cult classic Tempest 2000 also used MOD-format music in its soundtrack, which I love to bits. Happy face.

Thanks though, so very much. For me to be creating something so very different from what is predominantly seen around these parts and still get a positive response, it means a lot to me. :)

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Sometimes the smallest updates can feel like the biggest progress. And so, I actually managed to put in a functional energy bar!



Also a bunch of other things, both seen here and not-so: fixed the behaviour of the square glitches (they're essentially floating barrels -- explosion is their attack, and fatal. Actually shoot them to be safe) and wrote a little new music, plus gave each stage (now 'grid') its own name.

I'm thinking on proper cover/title art soon, though.

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