What is it?
Back in 2007 I started developing wacky ZDoom mods, but lately I've been wanting to do more standalone coding work. As a stepping stone I stumbled upon Love2D, and am currently working on a project based on this concept:
The story revolves around a shy Canadian girl who is trapped inside a technology and theory research building in Toronto, on the day after Thanksgiving (Canadian thanksgiving, mind you), far in the future, when a group of extremists take the building over, because they want to use the "virtual world to reality" technology being developed there to bring their horrifying in-theory only world to Canada, then into the US, and infiltrate the world. It's up to this shy girl, who was invited to the festive fall season kickoff by mistake, to try and stop their evil scheme. And boy, what does she get into.
It'll get interesting later on, with the "test runs" on bringing the horrible creatures to reality.
The gameplay is an overhead shooter - you go through each floor of a 60 story building, and every 10 floors you battle one of the top squad of goons - eventually battling the evil mastermind herself, a terrorist known by her online handle as "AbbyOriginal44". What the heroine stumbles upon along the way is horrifying at best - at worst it'll make you think twice about being invited to a party at a lab.
Gameplay wise, the gameplay looks like a smooth arcade game - eventually a score/health/lives system will be in place.
WE NEED SCREENSHOTS
In my history with the ZDoom community, if I don't post a single screenshot of something people get upset.
I'm gonna play it safe here and post some screenshots...
Here's what's working:
- SCROLLING. No longer are levels restricted to a 1024 x 768 window!
- Basic Collision Detection With Walls
- Lua code is now split up into multiple files
- Basic Enemy AI for the two enemy types that exist, although it's slightly broken in some cases.
- Enemies now die, as does the player. (Still needs work on the "restarting the level" portion)
- Smooth Rotation of the game's heroine, and three weapons work (pistol, submachine gun, chaingun)
- Better enemy AI System
- More enemies
- More levels
- Maybe some props to make it look more like an office building
- Find a better way to make levels. Right now my map format works best as it is actually built into the LUA code itself, so it's slightly faster, but it's not XML based. However, most XML tile editors I've find are lacking. So for now, this is how it is.
- Sound System. This is low on the list though, as I want everything else to function first. However this is where it's really gonna shine, as the bosses are going to be very talkative and taunt-oriented.
- Cutscenes and a tally screen between levels.
The reason it's called "Project Dominion" is I suck at titles and I wanted something to sound cool yet have some meaning - since Canada was a Dominion at one point, and the gameplay takes place in a fictitious building in Toronto, it only made sense to me to call this Project "Dominion". Then it stuck during the planning process.
This is not meant to offend Canadians in any way, in fact, some of my best friends are Canadian (one of them is the basis for the heroine). I also have frequented to Canada on holiday, so yeah, I have a great deal of respect for my neighbors up north of the border.
As for "Episode 1", well, if this is successful I might make more in the series. I all ready have an idea for a sequel if this goes well.
I do have some questions though - I want to start storing code on a remote server. I notice alot of people use GitHub. What... is it? I'm only familiar with the mediocre Google Project hosting service and a little sourceforge (bleh).
And another question is the fact I don't have an executable or love file uploaded yet, as this is constantly being changed by the minute (spring break is near so I have a lot of free time, currently faced with unemployment and all).
I will update this post as more features get developed.
