Today’s progress on my boomer shooter that was started out of a curious lingering thought: What Quake 3/Unreal Tournament style arena shooter can be built with current open source gaming engines that’s actually fun to play, without having to use any texture/audio sample/model libraries?
Well, here’s today’s checklist:
Decided on a name for the game: Torque Free Arena (sounds nice, descriptive and rhymes with Quake 3 Arena)
Lots of bug fixes
Netcode(!)
Multiplayer 1v1 Duel as game mode focus for now
Standalone server support, full shift to client/server model
Tested inter-Linux/macOS gameplay via LAN
Better weapon designs
Added a shotgun/short range spread weapon
Full game menu: Training/bot play, Multiplayer, Game Settings
Weapon bob based on movement and inertia
Improved weapon positioning for center/right, including angles and location of projectiles
Improved multi-core handling for different parts of the game for better performance
Dockerized server for public server hosting (tested only with podman locally)
Turns out: Procedural asset/design/model generation works quite harmaniously with an engine using ECS as Bevy does. Loading times are incredibly fast. This is a great and versatile engine.
If I reduced FPS targets on mid-tier systems I could probably bump the visuals even more to make it look more modern. Want to try it on my new Linux laptop with a 2024 Intel iGPU + Vulkan first to get some real world impressions of how it actually performs on constrained systems. I quite like the vintage flair though and including more players seems like a good compromise to bumping looks everywhere.
Played lots of rounds myself and I enjoy it. Feels even more Quake-like now. Can’t wait to play this against a human opponent. Definitely lots of kinks to iron out, shuffle weapon positioning around, see which spawn points really work and how it all impacts map balance. Some weapons feel overpowered but that could be the semi-aimbot’s impression. (Don’t let it get a rail!) Ammo is still partially undecided, but some weapons will need ammo pickups. Armor pickup is planned, so are health pickups.
Quite proud of the idea of combining the shotgun and rocket launcher into one weapon with different modes without introducing a secondary fire: It’s the same weapon with a variation on the overall design. One weapon, two slots to select it: One RL, one SG. With a nice transition even! Reminds me of UT’s Flak a bit in terms of functionality. Only downside is that only the RL is hovering around on the map, not the SG. (And having it transition to different states would be annoying, distracting and resource-waste for some eyecandy.) Maybe modern FPS already offer this but since I only played Quake, Doom and PUBG, I wouldn’t know.
Hit me up if you’re into this and would like to join me for a Duel or just test it locally against a bot. I’ll zap 5k sats if you’re serious about Windows testing on mid-tier to high-end systems. I’d need game logs, a few builds, 20 minutes of test gameplay against a bot, tops. Some technical experience is required; like building rust or alternatively letting your assistant deal with branch-checkouts, builds and log pulls.
Will be open sourced of course.
