Been awhile since I’ve written…
It’s been nearly 1 year since releasing Alien Arena on Steam, so I suppose there are some stories to be told, lessons that were learned, and where that game is headed. It’s also time to start talking about my new project, which I’m very excited about.
At the time of my last post, we had just returned from DreamHack, with a lot of hope that Alien Arena was taking off in a big way. We had promising deals on the horizon, and felt we had made a great investment. Having a booth at DreamHack was one of the highlights of my life, I only wish I knew going in what I know now, but regardless of that I am very proud of how we presented the game, and the response we got. Alien Arena began a resurgence following DH over the next couple of months. In the months that followed we saw minor bumps in activity, as well as some major, record breaking bumps. However, none of it seems to have been enough to make the game catch on. We tried dropping the price to a fraction of the original. Only a moderate increase in sales occurred – and of course it didn’t help that the main AAA title in this genre decided at about that time to give their game away for free! Work continues on the game however, with some nice updates in both content and functionality. The first of several map packs was released, and there are still plans for more prize tournaments. There is still hope, despite the genre of the Arena FPS seemingly fading into oblivion. The entire experience is quite memorable, and I’ll delve into that some more.
This brings me to something I’ve been dying to write about for the past year…the new project I am working on known as Zombie Deathrace Feeding Frenzy. This is a completely brand new game, with a new engine written completely from scratch. The entire thing began as a demo I was writing for a job interview for a company looking to explore mobile and VR platforms. They wound up cancelling the project, but I kept playing around with my little GLSL demo and started thinking of making a new, OOP style engine that could be used for PC and Mobile pla
tforms. Since VR was on my mind, and I had visited another company specializing in VR/AR, I decided on just trying to make a little aquarium, using a piranha 3d model that I had been using to create fishing lures from(now replaced with my own art). Pretty soon I had these fish swimming around in a box, which then became an ocean, which then became filled with terrain and all kinds of sea life. I soon realized this needed to be a game. Initially the concept revolved around the player being a zombie, swimming around and trying to eat chunks of human meat in competition with a school of hungry piranhas. My thoughts on it began to evolve as I realized a limited scope that this scenario would provide, and somewhere along the line it morphed into the idea that you and other fish were eating bits and pieces of zombies falling into the water and becoming powerful “zombie fish” as you ate. Various ideas for powerups and rewards now came into play.
The engine being written from scratch is far more streamlined and simplistic than the Quake-based CRX engine from Alien Arena. It employs a more modern shader model and netcode that is clean and done in a way to remove lag from the equation of feel and responsiveness. There are a number of rendering effects that are specifically geared for 
an underwater scene as well as a very efficient particle system. There is still much work to be done in a sense of removing some hardcoded items and creating an actual map format. Once that’s in place, my goal is to create a very easy to use in-game level editor. It will mostly be a type of thing where you can select a terrain(created in blender) and then place various items, powerups, and enemies. Making it dynamic will be the challenge.
Initially as the game came together, I had used models that were realistic that I had purchased online, but after a bit I really felt that the game had very little character. I started to look around to get ideas, and started thinking of a style that used realistic texturing, but cartoonish proportions and features. One by one, I added each new character, as well as items, meat, powerups, etc. Soon the game really began to take on
the envisioned style, and at this time I believe it’s where it’s going to be. As the scenes in the game became more complex and interesting, I started to get a good feel about how it was in an atmospheric way. I gradually added more rendering features that would give it a true “underwater” experience, such as light shafts, caustics, bubbles, surface water, and sounds that gave it that feel. All in all I’m really happy with how that turned out.
Writing a multiplayer game’s netcode from scratch is not for the faint of heart, but once you understand the concepts, the actual code isn’t all that complicated. There are some interesting puzzles to solve, some chicken-egg type issues, but in the end it’s far simpler than the old Quake-style netcode(which, to this day is still pretty darned good). Perhaps back then there were less standards and those had to be dealt with accordingly. Writing my own netcode also afforded me to explore some other features, such as creating an in-game voice chat(still a WIP). At the time of this writing, it’s working pretty seamlessly along with a master server dashboard that tracks stats and activity as well. Again, creating something from the ground up has it’s decided perks, especially when it comes to experimentation and not worrying about breaking any kind of compatibility.
The next major phase will be adding VR(probably Occulus) support, and getting the mobile version functional in a way that makes it fun. I have a version of the engine that is mostly working on Android, a few graphic glitches need ironing out, and getting around some limitations, but I think before long I’ll have a working renderer. Of course the mobile version presents some differences, such as the controls, and how I’ll handle 
that to facilitate movement and biting/firing weapons. The HUD will certainly have some extras in this version. I’ve (for the most part) ruled out IOS support. There are just too many rendering issues in OpenGLES that limit the game, and the market share (under 15% vs 80% for Android) just isn’t worth the effort. Linux support is probably another casualty, simply due to market share being fractional. On Steam, Alien Arena sales are 97% Windows, it’s not worth complicating the code base.
The other departure, which I’m sure is not going to make a few of my friends and colleagues happy, is that the game will not be open sourced. I know, I know, I have been a proponent of Open Sourced software for the past two decades, but for this game, ideals and philosophy will have to take a backseat to practicality. Integrating properly with Steam dictates that it cannot be OS, unless I do what I did with Alien Arena and write a wrapper. Not ideal. OS also makes it very easy for cheaters, sadly. Given the likelihood of in-game purchases and what-not, it pretty much just completely ruled it out. I also will be going completely solo with the code and art – not that I don’t enjoy collaborating, some of my fondest experiences have been doing just that with Alien Arena – but I want this to be something that I can think about only what I am doing, if that makes any sense.
I’m hoping that the PC version will be launched this Spring, soon followed by Mobile and VR. I will make some more posts soon detailing some features and the game play, and what I hope to achieve in terms of new ideas. It’s refreshing to just work on something that isn’t compared to dozens of other very similar games…hoping Frenzy will break some new ground, create a new genre…god knows the gaming world needs that in the worst way!