Mantis 7DFPS Post-Mortem: 7 Daze of Torsion

I did it. I actually built a playable FPS with multiple gametypes and a reasonable amount of funtionality in a week.

I started in a hotel room in Milwaukee, Wisconson, USA while working my primary career as an audio engineer. Using my trusty MacBookPro bootcamped into Win7, I took a clean install of T3D 3.6.1, started an empty project and added in my own collection of 2D,3D and [some]audio assets that are exact-name replacement for the stock T3D assets, essentially my own 'Full' Template without vehicles. I got a binary compiled, assets merged and had my player walking around with his own weapons in the morning before soundcheck, and after the evenings' show updated a number of scripts. The following day I flew to San Antonio, in good ol' Tejas and managed to get a bunch of scripting done whilst waiting for/on airplanes. I got home Monday, fired up my Win Desktop and got busy. For the next five days, I cranked out the project I'd hope to demo, at a somewhat reasonable pace, keeping up with professional commitments, rehearsals and a social life in the midst of it all. While it's no where near 'finished', it is in an advanced stage of completion, and while there's no real rewards in a game jam, for me I met four goals:

Goals Made

Primary Goal: I finished!!! I had not finished my previous game jam attempts so I felt good about this one.

Secondary Goal: Wanted to build a complete-looking demo of my 'space opera' game concept, that I could use to solicit funding.
It's setup so that a non-programmer could download, install and experience a reasonable fascimile of what I want my game to incite in players.

Tertiary Goal: Perhaps the longest-reaching effect of any game jam is it is a great way to hone your production pipeline.
Any inefficiencies in tools or use of them is made very obvious, and one's skill as a designer improves by seeing a project through to it's 'big picture' completion.

Quarternary Goal: Wanted to implement and test my own scripted 'addon' system, that would allow for the inclusion of modders'/paid content
or expanded funtionality. By giving my self the ability to add new features easily, I could finish it after the 7-Day jam ends.

For me the most important part of playing or creating any game is the experience of it. More than just the immersion of the art and gameplay, experience includes the ease in which the player can access, i.e. buy/download/install/run, your project. Being both a presenter and funder of media in a place know for such dealings, I know from experience that people with money, including the consumer, have very short attention spans. That and they're usually aren't as aware of what's going on 'inside' your project as those who created it. They just want to quickly and easily see, hear, perhaps even play it. Sure, a .zip file is an easy way to pass your work along, but they'll think better of you if you provide an installer that will do everything for them in one click, and get rid of it with a second. Even if you've convinced someone to take the time to download your project, or even take physical media from you, you'll still be lucky to get more than a few minutes of someone's time - you don't want them to waste any of it getting the game in place, you want them to spend the time fragging!!!

Another part of experience is consistency. In a game jam, each day is a microcosm of what a team would spend one to two months doing. Thus the hard questions of do I spend another hour (week) tweaking this effect, or does it give the player the feeling I'm trying to convey come about as they always will. I had quite a lot of functionality working within a couple of days of starting, but my priority was to demonstrate gameplay, not technology or eye-candy, so some of my cool weapon/environmental effects were sidelined untill I can troubleshoot/implement them further. My plug-in system didn't play well with the using the 'Publish' function found in the pre-MIT ProjectManager, causing me to lose quite a bit of time. Despite this, I got about a half-dozen examples of everything working nicely, could repeatedly play through each game mode, and still had enough 'bling' to impress my audience. I didn't have the wherewithall to test network play, nor the time to finish all the GUIs but you can play through my different gameplay ideas without too much effort.

Here's some screenshots:

Bots descend from orbit, types/numbers/loadout determined via script:




...while players spawn underground and must make their way to the surface, visible in the background:




..once deployed, bots will sieze/defend objective, assassinate a player, or hold position in reserve. Commando Bots guarding an orbital guide relay:




Waypoints with custom icons help players find targets/bases - btw thanks Robert!:



Goals Missed

Projectiles: I didn't have time to implement all of Robert Fritzen's and Sean Rice's projectile types, but did get most of the weapons to have two different projectile types.

GUI: Aside from adding Niko's 'Dark' theme, I didn't have time to do much with the guis, only adding what was needed.

Levels: Intentionally didn't get too deep into level design or optimization, just enough to provide obstacles for players/bots to fight around and whatever requisite assets were needed. The subterranean level needs to be zoned and re-lit, but there simply wasn't time...

Networking: I didn't have a network to test multiplayer networking with, nor much time to worry about it.
I'll be using Sean Rice's server and expertise to make this solid...

At this point I'm going to take some time to relax, but when I resume torque-tweaking again I'll likely spend a couple weeks testing network play, fixing a few things and setup a patching system. I plan to implement those weapon/environmental effects I didn't have time for, get what I've started solid, and then resume my usual feature-creep. In the meantime, download Mantis 7DFPS here:



Mantis 7DFPS




7DPFS Mid-Week

Note: There was an issue with the original upload of the game to itch.io in which the key commands were borked by the installer. It's since been fixed - if you downloaded it the first day or so, you can update it with this patch.