DISDAIN - a brand new Quake-inspired FPS (DEMO OUT NOW ON STEAM)

[SyntherAugustus]

Thank you! I'm going to look into that when I have time.

[Rudolph]

Cool title screen! Is the beginning of the first level a deliberate nod to DUSK?

 

I hope the final release gives us access to all GZDoom options, notably the ability to rename the character and enable textured automap display.

[sandwedge]

Enjoyed this demo a lot!  Great Quake feels with a some nice Doom nods too.  More thoughts in the vid, but generally I really liked the gameplay in this and the combat puzzle that started being presented - especially the first arena combat area where you get the rocket launcher and have fun blowing everything up in delightful chunks!  Not surprised someone with a well known gore mod would get that so right haha.  Really promising start, and looking forward to more updates!

 

 

[Rudolph]

EDIT: Making the Sword refill your health on kill is quite a good idea, I would say.

 

Oh, and those floating severed heads definitely startled me. XD

Edited October 15, 2022 by Rudolph

[Nash]

5 hours ago, sandwedge said:

Enjoyed this demo a lot!  Great Quake feels with a some nice Doom nods too.  More thoughts in the vid, but generally I really liked the gameplay in this and the combat puzzle that started being presented - especially the first arena combat area where you get the rocket launcher and have fun blowing everything up in delightful chunks!  Not surprised someone with a well known gore mod would get that so right haha.  Really promising start, and looking forward to more updates!

 

 

 

Love the video format, short and sweet with all the fat trimmed out! Thank you for playing! Some comments to your thoughts

1) There most likely won't be any crouching and therefore no teabagging, sorry. :P I am aiming to keep the mechanics simple - just run, jump and shoot.

2) Variations for the various death animations are definitely planned!

3) "Normal" is the canonical difficulty - "Hard" is meant to be hard and not meant for a first playthrough unless you're really good at FPSes! It doesn't follow Doom's difficulty paradigms
4) Sword kills will heal you - the sword absorbs souls that gets transferred to its wielder. The sword will be important to the game's plot, eventually :D

5) The Sisters are actually dodge-able - you can sidestep at the last second. There's a small window where they'll eventually stop homing - I think I need to make the distance more forgiving!

[Rudolph]

Then again, the fact that the Sword heals you can mitigate any damage taken from those floating heads!

 

I do have an issue with jumping. There is something about it that feels off to me and I keep failing the first mandatory jump on my first attempt. Maybe it is because the player-character moves differently from DoomGuy in GZDoom, I cannot quite put my finger on it.

 

Also, I am not a fan of having the Supershotgun assigned to a separate slot, but I understand that is how it works in both Quake and PS1 Doom. On the topic of the weapons, they all feel great to use!

Edited October 15, 2022 by Rudolph

[Wyrmwood]

I'd forgotten the demo of this was up between RL dramas and DW ones, once I get this long weekend of 12hr nights over going to give it a blast.

 

Am I the only person who finds the main character way creepier than any of the monsters. Looks like he's wearing a human mask, wonder what he looks like under it!

[sandwedge]

6 hours ago, Nash said:

 

Love the video format, short and sweet with all the fat trimmed out! Thank you for playing! Some comments to your thoughts

1) There most likely won't be any crouching and therefore no teabagging, sorry. :P I am aiming to keep the mechanics simple - just run, jump and shoot.

2) Variations for the various death animations are definitely planned!

3) "Normal" is the canonical difficulty - "Hard" is meant to be hard and not meant for a first playthrough unless you're really good at FPSes! It doesn't follow Doom's difficulty paradigms
4) Sword kills will heal you - the sword absorbs souls that gets transferred to its wielder. The sword will be important to the game's plot, eventually :D

5) The Sisters are actually dodge-able - you can sidestep at the last second. There's a small window where they'll eventually stop homing - I think I need to make the distance more forgiving!

 

Awesome, glad you liked the video!  Somehow I missed that sword kills heal, that's actually a great mechanic to include a nice risk reward system.  And yeah those sister heads were real trouble!  It's cool that they go further than lost souls and actually home in, but I agree making them a bit more forgiving could be nice.  As it was dodging felt really difficult and it seemed like just shooting them with a chaingun to stunlock them was better.  Anyway keep up the great work!

[Nash]

6 hours ago, Rudolph said:

I do have an issue with jumping. There is something about it that feels off to me and I keep failing the first mandatory jump on my first attempt. Maybe it is because the player-character moves differently from DoomGuy in GZDoom, I cannot quite put my finger on it.

I talked about this on Twitter - jumping/platforming in GZDoom can be quite a pain, yes, so I did attempt to remedy this by implementing coyote time. So it actually is already in there and I can confirm it's better than GZDoom's default of not having it at all, but perhaps the window is still too small. I can try increasing the coyote time window and see if this will help with your jumping problems!
 

 

Edited October 15, 2022 by Nash

[Rudolph]

"Coyote Time" seems like a misnomer to me, given how Wile E. Coyote always ends up falling. Good thing he has Buddha mode on at all time! :P

 

Have you considered giving your character the ability to double-jump instead? It would help mitigate a lot of missed jumps.

[RonnieJamesDiner]

10 hours ago, Wyrmwood said:

Am I the only person who finds the main character way creepier than any of the monsters. Looks like he's wearing a human mask, wonder what he looks like under it!

 

This made me laugh so hard, haha. He is a soul thief, after all! Inb4 Dis Guy revealed to be the true villain of the story, coerced into stealing souls from innocent creatures by the power hungry malevolence of the Soul-Blade.

[Daytime Waitress]

21 hours ago, RonnieJamesDiner said:

This made me laugh so hard, haha. He is a soul thief, after all! Inb4 Dis Guy revealed to be the true villain of the story, coerced into stealing souls from innocent creatures by the power hungry malevolence of the Soul-Blade.

 

And then his chest size increases?! Oh wait, Bamco aren't in charge of this one...

 

But fr, I enjoyed the heck out of this, Nash. Right out the gates (with the lovely Dusk nod) you set the expectation and pace so well, drip-feeding the roster and then shifting it all into overdrive with the first lock-in arena. It's a big, dumb, almost featureless stone room with only a couple of pillars and elevation changes, but it feels alive with the enemy waves, in-fighting, and, most importantly, the way it allows the player to explore their movement options. If you can achieve this much with a simple box, I can't wait to see you showing off with the architecture.

 

Just to add to the jumping conversation, though: I found it perfectly fine once I shut off the portion of my brain that kept telling me I was playing Quake. Although I still would've appreciated a teleport back to the gold door in the first map, rather than sweating on the traveling lava platform...

 

Final thought: I absolutely adore the possessed heads - just the perfect side of "I want to kill this because it's a threat", rather than "I want to kill this because, man, is that screaming getting on my tits".

 

Keep it up!

[Dasha W. Frost]

Hi there everybody, dropping by just to report some issues.

Tried co-op with my husband yesterday, twice (old-school way, made bat files)... unfortunately it was not working for us.

It goes "Out of sync with: 2" and/or "Waiting for: 2" almost right away, and shortly after - not even a minute in the game - it just freezes for both of us pretty badly. Task Manager showed a whopping RAM overload up to over 12GB (out of 16 available on my machine) like on the screenshot below... Ouch! Memory leak?!

 

Was wondering if it's just us doing something wrong on our side (help greatly appreciated!)... or it's a known issue, still WIP? Really would love to play it co-op eventually! :)

 

I also couldn't see his player skin either: he was just appearing as a black figure on my screen (no textures), although on his screen he could see my player with customized colours just fine.

[Nash]

2 hours ago, Dasha W. Frost said:

Hi there everybody, dropping by just to report some issues.

Tried co-op with my husband yesterday, twice (old-school way, made bat files)... unfortunately it was not working for us.

It goes "Out of sync with: 2" and/or "Waiting for: 2" almost right away, and shortly after - not even a minute in the game - it just freezes for both of us pretty badly. Task Manager showed a whopping RAM overload up to over 12GB (out of 16 available on my machine) like on the screenshot below... Ouch! Memory leak?!

 

Was wondering if it's just us doing something wrong on our side (help greatly appreciated!)... or it's a known issue, still WIP? Really would love to play it co-op eventually! :)

 

I also couldn't see his player skin either: he was just appearing as a black figure on my screen (no textures), although on his screen he could see my player with customized colours just fine.

About the desync + crashing + memory leak - this is a known issue. Coop doesn't work correctly with the version that's currently on Steam.

 

HOWEVER - as I am typing this right now, we will be testing a fixed version. Testing with pretty big latencies too (Malaysia - California) - so if our test session succeeds today, it would mean that I've ironed it out and it should be ready for a more public test.

Will report back here later. :)

PS - for black player texture - this is also a known bug - short term workaround is to change the graphics backend to OpenGL - Options - Display - Set Video Mode - Video Backend - then restarting the app. Will be fixed properly for Vulkan in an update patch!

[Dasha W. Frost]

Thanks a lot, @Nash!!! Sounds awesome!