I’m not sure where this creative impulse came from, but after finishing my last project I was done with game development for a while, and wanted to learn Godot kind of and didn’t have much of a direction. Then I played Max Payne.
What’s nice about Max Payne is that: you just shoot guys. Maybe you hit a button to open a door or an elevator, but that’s it. Not only that but guys just shoot at you, they don’t do anything complicated like have dialog trees, do specific tasks every day, or anything but shoot you. It’s a very simple game. That made me want to clone it. Somehow the words “gay furry max payne” kept rolling around in my head and I sketched an idea for a protagonist
And then we were off to the races. I took one of the models from the old game and spruced it up a bit. then started fucking around in Godot finally. As of last time I checked, you can move around and shoot bullets. There’s IK. The tail has jiggle bones so it swooshes around. The animation blending is horrible
I plan to eventually make NPCs to shoot that run around and Do Stuff. Then make some levels using TrenchBroom and see where that takes me. To be honest I’m approaching this very slowly and adding as little complexity that I can.
As far as plot goes, I want something lurid and really stupid, and that is: your boyfriend’s dad is a defense contractor, trying to marry him off to a senator’s daughter, so they can close an arms deal. You’re blasting your way back. I have visions of the final level ending with interrupting a wedding, I am trying to be as intentionally stupid with this as I can. If Crystal Slaves was my Evangelion, this will be my Gurren Lagann (author hasn’t seen Gurren Lagann)
My biggest hope for this is that it will have my favorite Gurren Lagann thing of just exponential scale increase over time. This is all you need to think about from Gurren Lagann for this. Exponential protagonist growth (in terms of firepower maybe?). Exponential enemy growth (in terms of firepower and/or number?). Gurren Lagann did it with literal size, but there are so many ways to take this.
I too have been excited by your sleek poster teasers. After your last game, I am excited to see you get into something very deliberately in response to how you worked on Crystal Slaves.
Havent forgotten about the game but typing this here to remind myself to poke it at least.
I think the next thing I wanna do is AI agents that run around. I might do what they call “competitive study” of Cruelty Squad to see what that game’s “possibility space” is. It’s weird that Max Payne 1 and 2 seem to ride on the slomo shooting for their entire length but a game like… Mafia 3 feels like much more of a drag despite there being more presumable variety. Max Payne 1 you are really riding in that last 20% of regenerating health for most of the game and I’m not sure how they got encounters to nearly always end by the skin of one’s teeth (there’s a lot of save scumming there too I guess)
the other thing is that there really isn’t variety in Mafia 3, it’s totally superficial, it is quite literally the same kind of missions stretched well past the length they can keep you entertained, the game’s cutscenes are more or less what keeps you going. Like all these AAA open world games are basically the equivalent of a 90s movie where there’s only 25 minutes of plot but it’s 2 hours long for some reason. Max Payne has an engaging story and gameplay the whole way through and they keep introducing fun new setpieces because they aren’t struggling to pad the length!
cruelty squad and max payne also benefit from being able to break the game up in levels and the designers decided what they wanted you to be able to do in each level or what it was about and then built it, where mafia 3 is clearly “we built this space and then had to inhabit it with content”
I think a lot about mafia 3’s construction site final boss level vs the entire construction site section in max payne 2 and how much better it feels than mafia 3 just dumping you into yet another space it’s spawned goons in. It’s like they assumed you being able to come into a place from any entrance or having the fucking gun van available completely deleted the need to actually design missions (and I have a fucking soft spot for mafia 3!!)
I had a mission in the DLC that takes place in the salvage yard, and every time I called for the gun van he would be driving out of where the mission was supposed to take place.
Update: I have added raycasts coming from the end of the gun to the center of the screen, which will give me a vector to send bullets to. and I’m using Godot’s signals so it’s like…5 lines of code?
I am gonna try to do object pooling and have the gun send it a signal to make a bullet.
nearly a whole month later and i have raycast bullets mostly working. soon ill add trail renderers and impact decals. then ill have to give our protagonist something to shoot…
