Onslaught Design Diary Part 2 : Figuring out how to build the game

Onslaught was being Developed as a game idea by me and a friend in 2002 and some.thing happened around then. The Idea was SO complex and large that a design document for it was becoming very hard to handle. The Logistics of adding tons of new ideas made it IMPOSSIBLE to even put it in the "right" format for a design document. They wanted weapons and enemies to be described in the LEVEL section, which for the game was stupid, How was I supposed to copy 150 ideas into each map and decide which ones should be in each level like that? Each was 2 paragraphs long! So in the end the idea was scrapped. It was dead in 2002. I learned later this was the right move, no one in gaming companies gets ideas from outside, I read. It made sense, why trust an idea by someone who doesn't know how ideas are done? But I still wanted it to be real, so I made the game as a mod to see how it would work and I kept on doing this till I made a phenomenal one! Actually making the game to distribute online, was going to be a huge feat. I tried two methods to make an onslaught game simultaneously. A) FPS Creator and B) Doom Modding A) Involved the best looking features on the surface but a lot of ideas were cut, and the games made with it eventually crashed bad in the game, so the the idea was scrapped. I had made tons of games this way but they failed miserably So In the end B) Turned out to the better move At first games made with both sucked bad. A) Gave me a lot of framerate problems in big maps. B) Had crappy maps for a while that came from doom wads, and was designed to be kept to myself. Eventually a good onslaught was done in 2009 but still it had to be kept to myself, borrowing things from other mods and such, and self made levels were too bad to really share - ironically someone said it was cool on youtube once. Eventually a decent version came out but the randomly generated maps were bad quality and were ONLY slaughtermaps and was bad due to that. Another 2 versions were made with a new texture pack and better gameplay by 2019. This is where the game suddenly hit good levels. By this Point Onslaught was scrapped and rebuilt 11 times. Each time was a little bit better but still not great. But one thing made me want to rebuilt it again - Dark Textures. I discovered the texture pack and made a demo onslaught using it. The textures FIT onslaught PERFECTLY, and I ended up using them for the project. Immediately the game went back into development hell. A scripting problem with the upgradeable cyborg powers made the forcefield power (which is vital to beat the game) unusable. Lots of changes were done to fix it, and although it was fixed, it took a major sacrifice, getting rid of the upgrade able powers to fix it. The game was finally out of 10+ years of development hell from 2010-2019. The game looked great and played well, the only thing that needed to be fixed was the levels. Me finding obaddon fixed it overnight. Using it's city building feature, I was able to generate realistic city streets for levels. This Boosted the game to amazing levels and made it amazing. With one bad exception, all the levels were fun. That one level is forgettable and not fun at all, but the levels for the most part were really good. Early levels were easy, later ones were a bit harder, mid way through they got hard, and finally got super hard by level 15 or so. It really ramped up by level 21, getting obnoxiously hard by that point, but that's what I wanted! It played great and got super fun! The game was finished! It was miraculous the game was released in a final state that was worth it 25 years after the initial design was designed by me and Hitman213. It was insane that it got so well designed. Decorate code for the enemies and guns were finalized and they closely matched old ideas. Old gun ideas were recreated like the spread rifle, overkill cannon, nuclear waste gusher, seismic disruptor, etc. Old enemy ideas like the classic musclehead and vampyre mutant came back after being changed due to not enough sprites on the r667 beastiary being close It was for all intents and purposes, an amazing transformation from the previous 2 versions before this alpha. The "vicious" onslaught was canned, new one liners were recorded, the character got 200% more badass with a new voice, which was done by me mimicking the wrestler Triple H, the old story was re-written, damian ichabod was turned into a total psycho rather than some weirdo like in vicious onslaught, the final section where you battle his ghost in hell was redone, and the game became reality, 25 years later!