First off, I'm certainly not a gamemaker, I'm mainly just someone who likes looking around on these forums to see all of the cool things you guys are doing. I'm a filmmaker, actually. But I remember thinking some things about a game a while ago, and i thought they might be perhaps a tiny bit of inspiration to someone, somehow. who knows? anyway...

i remember playing Halo, and while playing "blood gulch" (my favorite map) i remember thinking how cool it would be if you could set it up so that i and my friends could either attack a fort, or defend a fort, while waves of bots attacked our fort, or were defending the fort we had to take. for example, maybe we had one of the forts, and waves and waves of enemies came at our fort, trying to take it... so to pass, you simply had to survive. OR... perhaps a fort is defended by a certain number of enemies, and we have to take the fort. the variety in there comes in when you get to select 2 things... first, you get to select whether you defend or attack, and 2nd, you get to select the difficulty level. so perhaps if you are defending, and you select easy, then maybe you get 15 stupid enemies with pistols... on the other hand if you choose hard, you might get multiple waves of 25 or 30 smart enemies that have rocket launchers, street sweepers, and tanks... same goes for if you choose to attack... maybe it's guarded by 15 idiots... or 50 snipers... who knows...

anyway... you could realistically base a whole game around this idea... make 4 or 5 fairly small maps (as FPS's go) that have a little interesting terrain and a fort in them, and give all of these options of attacking or defending, and the difficulty level... and you could have a seriously cool, addictingly fun game, that would have a lot of replay value based on the different options the player could have in setting up each game.

the maps in this could be relatively small, so you could spend more time making them look and play better... and you wouldn't need a huge amount of them (4 or 5 is my guess) because you'd already have replay value built in. the AI might be some work... but i know there are some guys on this board who have the skills for that... plus some of the other program addons available could help in that. perhaps you could even customize it to the point of letting the player choose how many enemies there are... if they want 300 enemies, just do it as 12 waves of 25 enemies (so as not to have 100 enemies on the screen at once lol)... perhaps even let the player determine how intelligent the enemies are... who knows...

anyway... this is far too long as it is... sorry about that... they are just my thoughts... i know this is something i and some of my friends would enjoy playing, so i thought it might be the kind of thing that might catch someone's interest to make. i'm more of a fan of smaller higher quality games (beyond good & evil) than longer lower quality ones (azurik). and i'm not necessarily even a fan of FPS's in general, but even so, this is something i would play, so i'm sure there are plenty of others who would. if this interests or inspires someone, great... if not, oh well... just thought i'd throw it out there.

Hi astrophe

I've read your post a few times, popped back in and read it again, very thought provoking and apt

The mode you describe essentially already exists in many forms. For Vietcong 2 - Fist Bravo, my team and I implemented a mode called Hold The Line (HTL) where a team of upto 6 players had to defend their location against a never ending swarm of Vietcong and NVA troops, respawning in waves.

The team had to survive until the extraction chopper arrived to airlift them out.

In other games this mode has taken the form of 'Seek and Destroy' in Call of Duty and no doubt exists in hundreds of other ways in many other titles.

That's not to say that your idea isn't entirely unique, but more that it is clearly a strong component for modern FPS games, which is continually being re-invented and tweaked in the drive to get a perfect incarnation of this defend/attack style game modes.

Certainly within our current project we are working towards similiar multiplayer modes that have elements of this mode as well as implementing ways to include this game play within the core game play experience.

It's certainly a very important part of any multiplayer FPS title and having a solid design for it can give you the edge.

Nice post

thanks, indiGLOW. yeah, i figured this was implemented in quite a few big titles today... just haven't played enough FPS's to know which ones... as i said, i'm not a huge FPS guy...

that's cool that in your current project you are trying to implement that in both your multiplayer modes and in the core gameplay... that must be a fairly ambitious game... far more ambitious than i was talking about...

my thought was that a team could just make the part i described above, and that would be the WHOLE game. now i understand that for major studios, they can't release a whole game that is just that small part, but for a few guys working on a small indie game with no budget... they could make a fun and engaging game that is still achievable by them in a realistic amount of time. forget the single player game, which requires huge amounts of areas to be built... just make about 5 good solid maps, make some very good models for players, NPC's and weapons, and put in some decent AI, and you've got a decent game that people would want to play, and that would have a pretty good replay value...

as i said, your game sounds way more ambitious than what i'm talking about... and i wish you good luck on it i guess this idea can go either way... either as a smaller part of a much larger game, like yours... or it can be an entire game by itself....

just a thought, anyway...
but thanks again for your feedback, indiGLOW.