14/08/2008

The new GMod gamemode: Manufacture

This post is just about Garry's Mod. As if half of my posts aren't.

I could tell you about previous failed gamemode attempts. I could tell you about Crazy Delivery, which was a success in some ways (a technical achievement) and a failure in others (players couldn't work out what to do)
. I could tell you about Incursion, and how it rose and fell in the few months between now and my last real post. But I'm not actually going to develop on any of those points, because surely a blog is about talking about what you have done recently, and what you are doing.

So, Manufacture. RabidToaster is handling the mapping side and some of the coding, I'm drilling away at the core code and the interface. Seems a little weird doing this because I thik I have slightly more mapping experience than RT (maybe not? will he ever read this? only if I link him), and he does core cde a hell of a lot better than me, but we'll just see how this goes. We've been working for 5 days now, I think.

Two teams - rival firearms manufacturers - Nexus Inc. and Resistance Ltd. (Combine vs. Rebels!). The objective of a team is to end the game with more money than their opponent - manufactured firearms that players don't use are sold for profit, respawns, equipment damage and firearms theft account for lost revenue. Th
e fun part (hopefully) is that players can select what weapons and upgrades they want to research for their team in a menu, and these researches when completed manifest themselves immediately on the production line(s) of the team that did the research.

The production lines are the coolest things that are 100% working right now. Weapons pop out of some equipment one side, and are sold at the other. Anywhere in between you can pick them up and use them straight away.

What I was working on yesterday was weapon upgrades. I made a framework for researchable upgrades that can choose what weapons they want to be applicable to, and then do various things to them. For example, if I research Large SMG Magazines, new MP5s and UMP45s from the production line automatically get upgraded to use magazines of 45 bullets. Curently I've only done boring upgrades - damage, accuracy, ammunition capacity - but eventually it would be cool to have some silly, radical upgrades, like one that makes all your weapons use lasers and rechargeable energy cells instead of bullets. The one issue wih such big changes is how to appease players on a team who don't like lasers - well, we'll see if there are any!

The next big thing apart from making some weapon upgrades for rifles is giving the gamemode some actual gameplay and objectives. Stuff like players scoring points for kills, respawns reducing team money, some sort of destroyable equipment and bonus incentives for stealing enemy weapons (taking them back to a machine in your base to boost research?). But this stuff is mostly simple... the gamemode is going well so far, and I can't see any problems popping up in the immediate future (as long as we have good enough help that players work out how to play).

Gallery of images: (Parts of the HUD are temporary. The tech tree and its graphics are incomplete.)












Woo, I actually got images working the way Blogspot wants me to make them work.

Comment on my use of bold, by the way. I wanted this to be easily skimmable.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Haha, awesome blog post. I noticed the bold text and hyperlinks mainly because when I write my own blog I try to add this stuff.
Nice and lengthy but not boring too. Sounds like the gamemode could be fun.

Anonymous said...

yes i will ever read this

Deadchiken said...

Is this still active? Seems like a really interesting, original idea.

Im really growing tired of sifting throught countles RP modes to find something the slightest bit interesting... do tell...