oldSchool

This is a WIP project on which I've been working on lately (still working)... There is nothing special, just an old school pixelated look, three type of weapons (pistol, shotgun, smg), 4 type of enemies (melee attacking crap and shooters (same weapons as player)). I've added some camera effects from my previous project LAST STAND. There is also a respawn system, which I was planning to use in my other project, the idea is pretty simple, you have only three (let's say) lifes per a level, and after death you can use them to respawn at respawn point, position of which was saved by you (I liked idea of getting to life from bioshock).

About the resources that game uses, most of them aren't made by me, but changed to be used under this project as a placeholder, who knows maybe this time (hopefully) I'll make this one till the end, so I'll look for an artist to draw this kind of 8-bit sprites and textures. So this means, that nothing from the game resources (including, sprites, textures, sounds, .fx files and anything could be found in the archive) could be used or distributed!

Here you can download it from my webpage:
oldSchoolCrap

And for those who too lazy to download 3 MB game, here are some screens:


Edit: I've forgot to mention, in order to keep things really oldschool, try to play without a mouse:
For normal game experience with mouse everything is usual:


Greets!

this. is. awesome.

for my taste the resolution is a bit too low and the textures could use some work.
But except for these two things I like it

Thank you very much man!
About textures, I tried to keep things minimalistic, but maybe I failed
About resolution, well I tried to bring oldschool look, at first I thought about making it even lower!

TRY TO PLAY WITHOUT A MOUSE!

Agree with Kartoffel, it plays and feels really old school
But slightly too pixelated

Thank you guys. Ok next update, I'll try to make it less pixelated

Edit: the only MAIN thing missing right now, is a good and intensive 8-bit (chip tune) music! Does anyone of you guys know any good tunes still free to use for non-commercial use?

Maybe this can help: http://ozzed.net/

I like it, feels good. Yet I don't appreciate the visuals, it's way too pixelated to the point that I would not play the game, it feels bad on my eyes/ brain/ whatever, it makes me feel uncomfortable. I'd say at least double the resolution and make take inspiration from here (more stylized, though).

Thank you, I'll take a look at that one.

More music advices are needed!

Thank you for feedback, Superku! As I've said above, I'll increase the resolution, but no, I won't change the visuals to archive 'Brutal DooM' style. You probably don't see the point of this project... I wanted to create something as simple as possible, but yet funny to play. For 'Brutal DooM like' game, I have another 'frozen' project, video of which you've seen on my youtube channel.

do it yourself

Well I tried to make chiptune track, but it seems to be more harder than creating a simple chillout track

I don't think so. it's no challenge to get the right sounds (if you limit yourself to actual chiptune)

The other thing you need is 'just' some creativity... but you need that for any good song.

Well who knows, we'll see how things will go

It's definitely way too pixellated, not even the earliest 3D games looked this pixellated.

Also the font resolution doesn't match the rest of the game's resolution, which looks bad.

I actually like the graphics somewhat even though I normally dislike pixellated graphics. It definitely could use more details though (like posters, plants, stuff that you can find e.g. in Wolfenstein 3D too). Also weapons really need to be less pixellated, e.g. like this http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/2270/0000002417.600x338.jpg?t=1342306398 . And enemies too (e.g. like this http://gamecenter.nyu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/3413-doom1.jpg ).

What is up with the windows cursor floating all over the screen? Better to hide that. (yeah sorry I refuse to play a shooter without a mouse )

Also some doom or wolfenstein 3d like music would be nice as background music.

Good start I would say.

Thank you, very useful remarks about fonts!

As I've already said above, I'm not going to aim at DooM or Wolfenstein 3D style... For those kind of games, I've already made THIS! Here in this project, I'm trying to make it as simple as possible. Good remark about the mouse floating above the window, I've completely forgot about disabling it. About music, as I've already said before, I'm looking for free/good chiptune music and open minded for your suggestions. And sprites are place holders anyway...

Guys, you are looking in a wrong direction, instead of telling me about maybe bugs you may found, or gameplay remarks, you are talking about place holders and things which are adjustable within few clicks (pixellation).

Well I did not found any bugs except that floating mouse.

About the graphics, I understand that you don't want to recreate e.g. Doom-like graphics, but as it is, it is not really exciting to have a weapon that is made out of 4 different pixels, most importantly cause you can't make out what it really is. Now if you would give the machine gun weapon a similar resolution as e.g. this , one could atleast see clearly it is a machine gun (I am only talking about the weapon on the picture not other things).

Concerning gameplay, consider adding (semi-)big areas too (with more enemies) and more powerups.

I have some suggestions for you 3run .

the enemies start shooting way to soon , there needs to be some sort of a pause for a moment and some sort of reaction before they start shooting at you ,like getting startled /yelling before wasting ammo on you

the enemies different approaches to attack ,is quite good ,however it seems like they never miss ?

the enemies never seem to be caught unaware ,I guess this cannot be any different because they only face towards you always ?

there is never a period of reloading clips ,however you pick up ammo in clips , this kinda takes away the feeling that I am responsible somehow for managing my ammo .

I could probably also shoot through a whole level without worrying about ammo supply , because there seems to be too much of it , how about some enemies drop some pickups , this way you are rewarded for being successful.

hearing enemies close to you on the level within some radius would add to that retro feel ,at this point you are completely unaware of any and all npc's around you unless they're right in front of you .

enemies gang up on you , so the restrictions of the level size really squeezed me into being unable to avoid getting shot.

I know your still busy developing so some of my suggestions seems unrelated , but thats what I thought about..

I like it though , feels solid and there is definitely a doable game within those dynamics .

ps..I get there's unlimited ammo because its a test ,would have liked to have test it on a larger level with normal ammo clip sizes..

There is a pause, but it's depends currently on the fire rate of each enemy, so I guess I'll need to add a seperate state, like ALERTED or so, in order to make enemy get alerted and call other enemies around (they call for support around already ), and it will get triggered from specific amount of time, independent from fire rate.

well, they do miss, thing is that level area is too small, it could be really strange for them to miss when they shoot static object from two-three meters? They weapon also do has an accuracy, so they shotgun will work only for close ranges and so on..

They aren't always facing player, it's only the visual sprite which is always oriented towards the camera. Try to be more cautious, you may notice that when they aren't alerted, they more slowly, also 'walking' animation is player slower..

Reloading isn't planed at all. In most of older games (even DooM?), there is no reloading at all, only total amount of ammo for each weapon. Here in this project, I've managed to have only one type of ammo for shotgun and smg, so it's depends on the player how he wants to spends the ammo, via smg (high fire rate, low damage, good accuracy) or shotgun (low fire rate, high damage, bad accuracy).

About ammo, you've got the point of WIP project as I see your post above, as this wasn't an actual game level, only a testing area ammo isn't needed to be limited. Well, I'll think about pickups, but probably I won't added them, as I've said before this project it TRYING to be as simple as possible, the goal is to find a key->open door->move farther. Maybe you played a game called 8-bit killer?

This also won't happen, cause as soon as I'll add music on the background, all those noises will make some troubles overlaying with music.

About this one, in father levels I'm planning to have this kind of small level areas too, cause they do make you feel nervous a little bit, cause you are almost always waiting for an enemy to jump up on you from a corner with a shotgun, and well he won't miss if you won't move fast enough! This will be needed to dilute the simple gameplay mechanics I'm trying to archive

Thank you very much! You've had some really nice and very important remarks!


As I see that nowadays public doesn't really understand and like too simplified games, maybe I'll change the concept and style I liked to keep it simple as it is, with enemies which are only 2D, always rotated towards the player etc.. but I see that not much of people understand this kind of outdated look nowadays

I was aiming to get this kind of style at the end, I've already said that all sprites are placeholder, but well...

those screens looks way good , reminds me off outlaws comical style a bit.

well I am actually too old to even be around on this forums so I do understand the whole style of your game , and yes even doom II had the same ammo style .

I just think there's some things that could have been improved upon in the old games that could stil have made the style and games good , like the reloading ,though I know this is all your choices .

yip the a.i is good in my opinion , and the test level is really tight which makes it difficult , well I remember games with this style of key cards like doom and level styles like wolfenstein , I like the rise of the triad and duke nukem level style more though as a personal opinion.

, no that is not the problem. Sorry to say this, but it is about the art direction / artwork of e.g. the weapons that is lacking. It just isn't good. The pistol doesn't look like a pistol, the machine doesn't look like a machine gun etc. Wolfenstein 3D has also very pixellated graphics, yet you can clearly see the pistol is a pistol. Even better comparison is the image you showed there of 8BIT KILLER, you can clearly see that the weapon is a rifle/shotgun and the enemies are clubmen/barbarians. Even though the creator only uses a few pixels for each object.

And besides graphics are important for these games (whether it is good pixellated graphics or good realistic graphics or some other art direction), since you can't do much besides the firing and walking etc. you need to have some eye candy on the screen.

But maybe it is not only the texture but also the low video resolution (or it looks like that anyway).

Anyway I do think this is a good start so I hope you aren't disappointed or something like that, just keep it up and I am sure it will be great.

ps: is 8BIT KILLER any good? Looks quite fun.

well, this screens are almost the way I want my game to looks like at the end, I'll think about reloading, but probably I'll leave it as it is. cause once again, I'm not aiming at making better oldschool game, but I'm trying to recreate the feeling that you are currently playing one.

Ohh my... do you guys really ignore 'placeholder' word in every single post I've posted above? Or maybe you ignored, or didn't see that this is a WIP project? Or maybe you missed this one?
Once again, you are looking in a wrong direction when you start talking about graphics.. There are more important things at this stage of development. The current look is just about 10 % of what I would like to have.. F.e. does your 'fps coop Reconnaissance' project look the way you wanted it to be like at the end of development? Does it equal to the 'quality' you are aiming at at the end? I don't thing so.

Well, I'm not advertising anything, but it's really good! Same as gun godz, but it's wasn't as interesting for me, as 8bit killer, which has that really 'oldschool' feeling... it's really feels like you are playing an old NES game

, yes I know you mentioned it a couple of times , but I thought you maybe thought it was cause it was pixellated. So I thought I would point out that I think the art direction could be better. And that was alot of thoughts .

, great gonna try it.

- edit, I missed this bit earlier;
, no not yet but I found the feedback of Superku and MasterQ32 which also was about graphics very valuable and I am actively updating the graphics and have so since the beginning (but it is a fairly big project so it takes time). Point I want to make: giving feedback about graphics in early stage can be really helpfull.

Okay, I played both 8-bit killer and your game so I could give some more useful feedback. So here goes:

The good:

Your game feels wayyy better than 8-bit killer in just about every way. The weapons feel good, the movement feels good, the blood is an awesome touch, etc. Playing 8-bit killer I got bored extremely quick because the mechanics are frankly just awful. No speed, terribly boring level design, awful delay on the hit impacts and basically no good visual/audial feedback at all. Basically the only prop I can give to that game is that it has a nicely executed art style and a cute introduction.

But yeah, your game is still better. So kudos for being that much.

The bad:

The graphics in your game really are pixellated to a fault, and it's not just a matter of looking bad, it affects gameplay too. When enemies shoot at me, their bullets are so blocky that I hardly know where I should move, and I can't see more than a few blocks in front of me before it all just transforms into a mass of pixels. I know you're fond of ultra-low res graphics and stuff, but this doesn't evoke any sense of nostalgia. It's not good!

Speaking of evoking nostalgia, there are a lot of things besides the resolution which mess with that in general. For example, the shadows look really sharp and defined for a "low-res" game, which doesn't make any sense. The shadow maps are not "old-school" so if your game is meant to be "old-school" then you should remove them. Same goes for the alpha blending and all those other visual effects you have going on. Get rid of it!

Some of the sound effects seem to clash with your retro aesthetic too. Like, most of them are low-bit chiptune whatever stuff, but then there are some sounds that are really high-definition, ie the sounds that are played whenever you pick up a new gun. That doesn't make any sense. Pick one style and go with it.

Last notes: could you please disable that TAB debug feature thing when you distribute your exes? I tried to alt-tab to this window to write this review while the game was still running, but that thing popped up so I pressed ESC to close it and the whole game quit.

Also, it would be nice if you stuffed the game's resources in different subfolders so I don't have to dig all over the place for the .exe when I download your zip files. kthxbai

Thank you!

Pretty useful remarks, thank you once again! About resolution, yes I realized myself that I've used too low resolution.. It was 80x60 or something like that Now I've changed it to 200x150 and it's way much better! About the art style, don't judge this too much guys, those are just PLACEHOLDER! But I'm thinking about changing the whole style... to something more that wolf3d

Agree with Redeemer, your blood effects, weapon impacts etc. are good, keep that. Just saw a gameplay movie of 8bit killer and besides the art style/textures it looked not so good I think.

Well, maybe you guys don't like it, cause were expecting too much from it.. I can say that I really liked the game, it has the atmosphere of old games, that's way more important that weapon mechanics, blood effects etc. It plays, it feels oldschool, like old NES game from 90s. And I liked the music from the game, it's awesome! Boss fights, dialogues between levels (story!), the game is pretty good.

Wow the forum is alive

Concerning the resolution I think you should switch to something classic like 320x200 (PC), 320x240 (PAL console), 320x224 (NTSC console). Just for the numbers.
200x150 feels like... unrelated to oldschool).

, more like undead

, it gives a bit a (old) megaman vibe which is cool I think, but weapons etc. do really feel lame/weak I personally think (but that is a matter of preferences).

You are absolutely right! Thank you for input

I don't think that you can point out any old fps game (older than wolf3d and doom) which has some really good weapon mechanics. In wolf3d weapon doesn't even blob? But thats the way old games are made, and thats what makes 8bit killer look like pretty old game.

, yeah but why make a game and leave almost strictly better features out of it? Its pure nostalgia.

I can't give you your list cause it doesn't make any sense to base a fps gameplay off fps's gameplay released before the wolfenstein 3d time. That being said, Alien vs Predator (1994) was released before doom 2 and was totally awesome and innovative (I know not released before wolfenstein 3d, but still very old). Talking about awesome hit sounds and hit impacts.

Honourable mentions:
- Heretic 1994
- Rise of the Triad 1994

Its a bit like someone would make a warcraft 1 like rts but doesn't add the ability to use your mouse to select several units at once. While adding that feature would not kill off any nostalgia feelings, in fact I think it would only enforce nostalgia feelings cause the player won't be distracted by annoying controls (or lame hit events when talking about fps games).

Doom2 was Doom1 made better and more challenging

Doom was awesome for the ways it was possible to build levels. Other shooters at that time did not support such level design.

Shooters which I remember besides Doom:
- Hexen (1)
- Duke Nukem 3D
- Heretic (1)

And then there is Shadowcaster, using an advanced version of the Wolfenstein 3D engine, made by Ravensoft (the same guys who brought us Heretic and Hexen later on).
I played it late when it already was considered old - back at its days it must have been awesome.

I still play Doom 2 sometimes (although with better graphics mod or Brutal Doom mod).

the last days I have been playing blood through dosbox , I think it needs a remake .

Blood (1) was epic, I mean being able to play soccer with a zombie's head was comedy gold. And the voodoo doll, loved that game.

Doom II is probably my favorite game ever.

A couple days ago I took a break from working on my game to do a bit of mapping for it:
http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/?file=levels/doom2/Ports/p-r/quandary.zip

The first half of the first Episode was truly epic, also the part where you're spilling blood in some old mansion was gorgeous... but there were way too many levels which just sucked by design. So in total it can't keep up with Doom and Duke Nukem 3D, although the bonus for kicking zombie heads, crazy monks as enemy, pitchfork and hair spray fueled flame thrower is huge.

Yes that is indeed my biggest gripe with some oldschool fps's like Blood, the map design can be quite weird and annoying. Quess that was also a bit cause of technical limitations.

I recently played Redneck Rampage (1) for the first time, and was quite suprised (positively) by the map design. Lots of houses to explore, bars (/pubs) that feel like bars, a tornado you had to evade while lurking around a village. If only they did not put in those annoying buttons that are hardly visible (e.g. small black lever on a dark wall, a tiny dark grey key on a high closet etc.).

Blood actually uses an advanced version of the Duke Nukem Build raycaster Engine. The level editor back at that time was more or less revolutionary (imho!), very well documented and very good to handle. It felt more like they ran a bit out of ideas, as the quality of the levels in Blood differs significantly. At some points I had the impression the developers tried to expand the content after finding out they're running out of time. So build some annoying areas and throw mobs inside.

I mean... those levels are pure love:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_cRgyFh29A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IdrAxHFb1c (0:50 ...love it)
Yikes... I hated those reapers

"get off my train", 'zombie jumps off train'

I liked dark carnival too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJ4HLBftEMU and some swamp level with the creepy transparent ghosts/spectres that screamed in your face while carving in you with their scythes.

-edit, yeah I think reapers are the monsters I meant

We used to have the Blood shareware zipped and renamed to .res hidden in the windows\system folder at school.
Whenever there was time we went to the computing area and had 8 player deathmatch in the very first level. In fact it's one of the best levels to have deathmatch.

If a teacher had found out we would've been in serious trouble

When I see this thread alive like this, it makes me smile. It reminds me of those old good times when forum was active.

Blood is one of my favorite games of all the times, same as redneck redemption. But the best one is duke nukem, cause its was the first game I've ever played and I was 6 years old if I remember correctly, my brother got tired of playing of the levels and offered me to give it a try, I was so happy back then, but I couldn't really play it, I was always dying


Edit: btw, some of you gonna hate this old style I guess
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3Oqz5WjDPI&feature=channel_page

I liked Blood deathmatch too. There was this level with 2 opposing fortresses with an ridiculous amount of weapons/items so one could booby trap the whole place. Fun times . But never did a 8 player deathmatch, can't imagine how chaotic that would have been .

, your story reminds of the first time I was playing Blood. I was also ~6 years, and my brothers let me play it in the living room. While poking a bit with my pitchfork at the zombies and playing soccer with their heads, my mother came in the room and looked at the screen, that face that she had was golden .

Duke was cool too. I hope that they (Gearbox?) make another worthy sequel to it.

lol I remember the time my parents banned me from playing computer games, after they've seen me punishing zombies with crowbar in half-life they used to set passwords, hide keyboard etc, but it never helped.. ^^

I'm afraid duke nukem is dead and never will be brought back to live..

3run this graphic reminds me when my old ZX Spectrum overheats and game crash. This c64 game looked horrible 30 years ago, and now i belive there is no person on this planet who can play this game over 30 minutes and that it does not cause serious health problems. After watching video about 30 seconds, my head already pulsate .

About your game, mehanics is great. Everything is nice and there i don't have nothing to add, simply great work. From visual side - i'm retro guy but this goes beyond the retro style when our grandparents were teenagers. To be clear, i think that in my life i've never played anything with a lower resolution (i lie - it was my first Pong console), and i have to congratulate you on it.

Just give us some pixel more, and everything will be perfect. Now it is extremely low resolution.

Technically wise this C64 shooter is very much insane.

I think Duke Nukem Forever sort of killed Duke Nukem... forever.

Even though DNForever was quite bad, I actually enjoyed it somewhat (the burger king map was kindy fun). I think that if they would do a another one, they would have learned from their mistakes and it would be alot better. Also they did made profit from DNForever I think.

I think more of it was due to bad ideas/designs which were given more traction than they deserved. It's the same reason Thief has several awesome raid-the-mansion levels mixed with some very subpar run-around-caves-and-fight-zombies levels. There was just nobody around to tell the designers, "no, this is a really bad idea and you either A) need to make more good levels or B) just stop making levels completely".


Build is not a raycaster, it's a portal based engine kinda like Unreal.


That game was actually made very recently. It's a homebrew project and "MOOD" is just "DOOM" backwards. Take a look:
http://csdb.dk/release/?id=40255

So it's not legit "old-style" and I don't feel bad to call it ugly as fuck either. No c64 developer from the '80s would've made a 3D game on the system knowing that it would look that bad.

@Redeemer, still bad ideas can be caused by technical limitations. I never worked with these engines, and only saw my brother a few times making custom maps for doom 2, but I could imagine it was quite difficult to make good maps for those games. Don't know though, you probably know it better since you did mapping for doom 2. Do you find it difficult?

Build indeed doesn't seem to be a raycaster. Again something learned.

http://fabiensanglard.net/duke3d/build_engine_internals.php

Guys, I'm thinking about turning this game into a WWII game, with style oldstyle noTILTangle mechanics, like in wolf3d. What do you think?

Something like this?

Yeah thats pretty cool. I like that it has darker colors than normal wolf. 'thumbs up'

Maybe consider adding something unique in terms of gameplay to do the game though. Like perhaps some special nazi weapons ^^.

No, in fact it's very intuitive and certainly much easier than making maps for modern game engines.

Making Doom maps is pure joy
Back in the Doom days I used Dmapedit. It was very intuitive, stable, and procduced great results. It just didn't have a realtime edit mode like the Build Engine had, but you quickly learned how the numbers you type in all the time will look in 3d

You sir didn't say a thing about the new style

, yes that was probably the editor my brother used too. Maybe that is why it just looked so difficult (and was I young, quess that counts too ).

Now I want to create old school games too

I'm not into WWII stuff at all, so I can't really give you hints there.

The quoted part applies to all editors in use at that time
Actually, a few years ago I had some discussion about editing maps back at that time and the result was A3Tools. For Acknex3 you created maps the same way, just that WED was really minimalistic and that made it a bit frustrating when being used to Dmapedit. If I remember correctly it was a DEU (another Doom editor) spin off, without all the doom specific stuff, so not much of its functionality was left

I take it this one is yours? -> http://www.firoball.de/index.php?id=7
Going to try it out.

, haha that line made me laugh

I also came across this http://www.teaser.fr/~amajorel/yadex/doom2_map04.png , which is based on DEU I think. Looks pretty cool actually.

Yes that's mine. A "write WMP/WMB" feature is missing - since the use of all this is pretty limited I never started fiddling around with that.
I'm not even sure if by now I still understand all the code. I know there was some really tricky and very messy stuff avoiding crashes due to layered walls/vertices.

If you want to know more, maybe a moderator should split the discussion to another thread.

Oh no need for that. I was just curious to see what kind of levels it could build (/just for fun). The bat files don't work though (I have windows 7 here).

If 3run is okay with those somewhat related discussions I say we keep it like this. Creating a dedicated thread for specific discussions is never wrong though.

@3run: I have to say I don't like the idea of going for a WWII game that much. Why don't you create your own setting/ universe instead, for example a fictional regime (optionally on a fictional planet) or something completely different?

Huh? I also have Win7 and no problem.

It's completely ok. I really love to see thread being alive! Plus, it's a very interesting discussion!

Well, that's cause I don't want to spend time on arts, design and so on. I would use directly sprites from those wolf3d mods as a placeholders, and they already look pretty good. I really wanted to create something sci-fi, but I didn't find any good resources. I thought about making a game, where you need to escape the prison cells each level, and over and over again, you get caught and try to escape again. In order to add something fresh into the gameplay mechanics, I wanted to add more stealth features, sneaking, leaning around the corner.. What do you think? This game mechanics will works nicely with another game setting too, but it's just a lack or resources that makes me thing about WWII style..

, I see a black window for a sec and than it is gone and nothing happens for the .bat files under the a3games folder. The .bat files under binary folder do seem to work though.

, a semi action semi stealth games sounds fun. But I would allow the player to also go full rambo when they want (but just very difficult sometimes; e.g. by having not so much ammo / forcing them to go melee ninja style).

Thats on the list already, I'll allow player to sneak around the level, but it's his choice to do so or not

Ah that's clear. Not all of the A3 game resources include the published game, and some of those bat files are for starting up the old WED (during development I sometimes had to check how things are supposed to look the correct way), which is not included. The games were a direct copy/paste from my A3 folder.
The published games (tlol, wok) however should run with Dosbox - although this never was the point of those folders. It's just levels, scripts, assets for the converter to read.

, great, for some reason I always like to go rambo in stealth games ^^

@Firoball , ah that explains it. Sometimes I forget how old the Acknex engine actually is

What about a small horror game instead of WWII?

That sounds and looks much more promising!
Obviously one could go for a no combat Amnesia style horror game but I think I'd prefer a Blood + Amnesia + Resident Evil crossover style of gameplay.

Well, that could be done too, but this way player will be able to kick monsters ass, so there should be a bunch of monsters, that's what I don't like to do. Or I could create some smaller enemies, which can die without any affect on the story line.. I need to think about this.. But all in all, I guess this has more potential than creating another WWII game, there are too many of them out there.

I would not choose for pure horror, cause there are already alot of those games recently (all those Amnesia clones) and is kindy difficult to do when you can only see a few pixels (= less scary). But some mix between action and suspense/horror sounds best. Perhaps something like the old Aliens vs Predator game (when playing as a marine) but with monsters instead of aliens and pixellated?

Maybe this give you some ideas (when doom and avp get a child): http://www.moddb.com/mods/acm-2014

So make it so killing monsters isn't just a matter of pointing at them and clicking. Like Dead Space for example invented the whole strategic dismemberment thing, so suddenly one bad guy is a more serious problem since you can't just shoot at it, you have to aim at each of its limbs and knock them out one at a time. It's more complicated and it's new and fresh, and therefore it is fun.

And I'm not saying you should copy *that* design directly... but you should try being more inventive with your gameplay first and foremost before you put effort into settling on an art style.

Bioshock went through a ton of revisions in its visual design before they settled on the underwater city theme. Originally it was going to take place in a nazi bunker. The one thing that stayed constant through the game's development though was the Splicer -> Little Sister -> Big Daddy thing. They took that design and made it a huge part of the game from the beginning. So you need to think of interesting concepts like that before you try to imagine what kind of weird settings your game should take place in, because it's not the art style that makes the game, but the game design.

Since you guys have been talking about Duke Nukem 3D and Doom and stuff so much in this thread I thought I'd share this with you guys:

[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQYsFshbkYw[/yt]

It's an explanation of how to make a 3D engine with the same basic functionality as Doom or Build. The engine is software based so you get to see how the most fundamental steps of rasterization work as well. I hope you guys enjoy it!