Padded Room Productions

Padded Room Productions

Presents

Battle Plague

Drew Linderman, David Markham, Michael Pisarsky, Raymond Whiting

Description

General - Team-based multiplayer First Person Shooter based on the Half-life 2 engine. Our game will focus on capture-the-flag gameplay where your objective is to defend your flag all the while attempting to steal the other teams flag. We will be focusing on making a strategic and team-oriented experience all the while keeping with the excitement that traditional shooters offer.

What Seperates Battle Plague - Battle Plague will separate itself from other games in that it will have a very original and fun gameplay style. None of the gameplay elements are particularly original, however combined they will bring a very exciting and original feel to Battle Plague.

You can think of Battle Plague as having the tense gameplay of Counter-strike, but removing the frustration of waiting on death and also adding various strategic and team-oriented elements.

Battle Plague will have moderate-paced gameplay in which you must think about your movements, it will bring in various strategy elements that force players to use their heads to achieve victory, and it will force players to work as a team to achieve victory, all the while the game will be rapidly changing, situations will change at a very fast pace.

Typical multiplayer games boil down to having ninja-fast reflexes and an itchy trigger/mouse finger. The popular mod counter-strike is the perfect example of this. The best Counter-strike players are the ones that are able to get a headshot the fastest, there is very little variation. We want Battle Plague’s action to be frantic, however with the strategy elements we will introduce it will require more than split-second accuracy to achieve victory. Every weapon and ability has its strengths and weaknesses; you will need to know how to counter what the enemy is doing to gain an advantage. This element will be similar to the mod Firearms.

Another thing that many multiplayer games do is allow the player to move at extremely fast speeds and take a great deal of damage without any repercussions. The game play in these games turns into constant circle strafing and people just running head-on into battle. We feel that something more in line with Counter-strike’s hyper-realistic damage model would be more suiting for us. However even Counter-strike allows you to move at very fast speeds and turns into big strafe wars. By slowing players down and having damage actually hinder the player’s movement and accuracy we will force players to move in ways more in line with what they would on a real battlefield. Players will find that the best way to navigate our urban, debris filled maps will be working as a team flanking the enemy and running from one piece of debris to another while teammates provide cover fire.

Various games have used strategic elements such as Team Fortress Classic and Tribes which both used a class system which allowed players to choose their role in a fight. This allowed players to choose the way they fought and allowed them to play the game differently if they chose to. These games also used the capture-the-flag style of game play to create very basic teamwork. The teamwork in these games left something to be desired at times. Teamwork typically consisted of having defenders and attackers, and maybe even having a few people actually fighting alongside each other. We will design our maps and weapons/abilities around forcing the ENTIRE team to work together, not just a few people. There will be no way in Battle Plague for a single person to steal the enemies’ flag, instead you will have to work as a team and get a strong presence in the enemies’ base before you can achieve victory, this hasn’t been done in many games in the past.

We will have a class system to start with and these different classes

will be forced to work together. No one class will overpower another, and all the classes rely on each other. When we have enough content we will allow players to make hybrid classes and further customize the way they play the game however they will still need to work as a team just the same and will rely on other players to achieve victory.

Engine - The Half-life 2 engine is a cutting edge 3D engine that has an advanced physics engine. The engine has various features that we will be taking advantage of including a robust network code. The Half-life 2 engine is a FPS engine by design so we won't have to spend our time working on non-game related code such as network code, collision detection, etc.

The Half-life 2 engine will allow us to make a much more complex and modern game than we could if we started everything from scratch. If we decided to make a game engine we would have had to spend most the semester just to get the a very simple engine running, not to mention this would be no where near as powerful as what Half-life 2 offers us. We also didn’t want to spend the bulk of our time on artwork so the Half-life 2 engine was a perfect fit again because it allows us to use some pre-made character models and textures. This allows us to spend our time coding our game, making maps, and making some basic artwork (weapon models).

We also felt that working with an engine would be more in-line with what we would do in the actual industry. Very few developers actually make graphics engines, most take pre-made engines and make their games using them. Making a simple 2d or 3d engine would be useless compared to what you would actually do in the gaming industry.

Half-life 2 limitations

Bugs/limited SDK - The Half-life 2 SDK is what allows us to modify Half-life 2. It comes with a map editor, model animator, a few sample maps, all the half-life 2 textures, as well as parts of the code that can be modified and turned into custom dll files. The SDK is however in a very basic state, it does NOT allow you to remake Counter-Strike Source, Half-life 2, or even Half-life 2 Deathmatch at the press of the button. For those who don’t know Counter-strike Source and Half-life 2 Deathmatch are the multiplayer portion of half-life 2, however since they essentially are absent from the SDK we cannot use any part of them in our game, at least not without a great deal of work to recreate them. This leaves us with the Half-life 2 single-player SDK and a very basic bug filled multiplayer SDK to work with.

When you compile the multiplayer SDK for the first time all you get is a very simple no-frills multiplayer map with a couple weapons from counter-strike source, one character model, and a TON of bugs.

Anything beyond this very simple bug-filled mod has to be recreated from scratch. Certain portions of Half-life 2, including character models, weapon models, and various parts of code can be ripped from the game, however this still takes a great deal of time and wouldn’t be too much faster than just making them from scratch. Attempting to recreate something like Counter-strike Source would take the entire semester given what we have.

Since we are not however, trying to remake Counter-strike Source, or Half-life 2 Deathmatch, we feel this lack of pre-made multiplayer content will not be too harmful to our cause. There will still be various bugs we will have to work out, but since most of our coding was going to have to be original anyway, the lack of an all out multiplayer SDK will not be a big deal.

Uncommented Code- The SDK has very limited comments and documentation. Whether these comments were removed or just didn’t exist in the source code is not known, however because of this there is no one holding your hand walking you through the code like you might think. The code is all very cryptic as you would expect a large program to be and has little documentation to tell you how to do things, this leaves us with finding things out on our own. We feel that dealing with this type of SDK will allow us to advance our skills a great deal more than something like 3d Game Studio where anything you would want to do is all carefully documented.

Complexity – The Half-life 2 engine is the most advanced engine on the market and because of such, it requires a great deal of work to do anything with it. Things that would be very simple in a 2D game become mind-numbingly tedious attempting to do in Half-life 2. Things such as maps and models must be very highly detailed or they are not only wasting the advanced features of the engine, but they will look awkward juxtaposed in the highly detailed engine. Coding for Half-life 2 is about as advanced as you can get, forcing you to code in C++ and deal with all the technicalities that a program this massive contains. We feel this extra work is more than worth it, and we feel our talents would be going to waste if we were to spend our time making a simple 2d or 3d game.

Gameplay

Gameplay Objectives - Will be Capture the Flag, where there are 2 teams each team has a base with a flag inside. The objective of the game is to infiltrate the enemy base and steal their flag and return it back to your base, at which point the round is complete. After each round, players spawn back at their base with the flags reset and begin anew, somewhat like a boxing match or soccer game. There will be a “cap limit” as in the winner of the overall game will be the team that captures the flag enough times to reach the cap limit.

In addition to capturing the flag, a team can win the round by exhausting the other team’s tickets by killing them. Each team starts with a set number of tickets and every time someone on your team dies, you lose a ticket, when you run out of tickets your team loses. This is similar to the system Battlefield 1942 uses and will make sure the rounds don’t turn into a big stalemate.

Buy Menu/Classes - Players will have the ability to choose what class they want and in more advanced versions they can choose hybrid classes. For choosing a hybrid class the player is actually given a buy menu where they can choose a weapon layout/abilities based on their personal preference, within the money restrictions that we set. All players start with the same amount of money and weapon/ability costs are balanced to allow players to play as with a variety of different strategies. Even when we start allowing for hybrid classes we will still have default classes/layouts for new players. Each class/layout will have its strengths and weaknesses and will rely on the other classes to win the game.

Gameplay - M.U.S.C.S.O

·  Moderate paced – The game will have fairly realistic damage. Firefights will typically last 2-5 seconds. This does not mean that you will only last for 2-5, this means that when bullets start flying, typically someone will die in 2-5 seconds. You cannot go running out in the open or you will be killed almost instantly, you must work as a team and plan your movements.

·  Urban combat - The gameplay takes place in city setting. Debris is scattered throughout the levels and there are rarely large open areas.

·  Semi-realistic - Players last only slightly longer than they would in real life, but they don’t appear invincible like typical action games like Quake. Taking damage will also slow down their movement and mess up their accuracy.

·  Cover based - Players are rewarded for using cover by not being killed within seconds. Because we are restricting the movement/turning speed of players, as well as players becoming "stunned" when they are hit, players will not be able to charge head on into the enemy and expect to survive. Players must use debris and other objects to flank and get good positions on their enemy.

·  Squad-Oriented - Players cannot expect to capture the flag alone, they must fight alongside their teammates and assist them where needed in order to survive. The maps will be designed so there are 2 or so choke points in the middle of the map, players are forced to go through these choke points in order to reach enemy base. The team who can take control of the choke points will typically win the game. Also the maps will be designed so the flags are fairly easy to defend, this forces the attacking team to have a strong force around the flag before they have any hope of taking it.

Universe - Universe is set in nitty-gritty future set in a not too distant alternate future. Looks similar to the Warhammer: Dawn of War.

Story - It was 1997 when Norway developed the Organic Replication Device, a device able to bring deceased humans back to life. In their greed Norway sold the powerful device to every military on earth and sealed the fate of humanity. Militaries became invincible, wars waged on and on, and earth turned into one giant battlefield.
Losing all sense of time after so many replications, these warriors are now cursed to fight on for eternity, never understanding what they are fighting for, never knowing anything but war. The few sane humans left in the world describe these warriors as being diseased, bred for war with no hope, no cure for their affliction. The world has been taken over by a plague of epic proportions, a battle plague of sorts.

Classes:

These are the default classes that new players can

choose from in our Goal level of development:

Medic: SMG, Medkit, Light armor. Main role is to keep his squad alive. He is

equipped with a decent weapon so he can hold his own, but his light armor

prevents him from doing anything too aggressive.
Scout: Handgun, Speed boost, Pain tolerance, Light armor. Best for capturing the flag, very agile and good at escaping fights. Can hold his own at times but would prefer to flank and avoid head on battles.
Assault: Rifle, medium armor. A basic damage dealer, good all around. Has good range and is probably the best all-around fighter in heated battles.