DELUGE - An Abandoned Retro FPS Attempt
DELUGE was a project that started life in July 2019 and ended in March 2022. It was to be part of the recent wave of retro-style indie first person shooters pioneered by games like Dusk, Ultrakill and Amid Evil. It used the GZDoom Engine which had been previously used for the successful retro FPS Hedon and contemporary games like Selaco, Darkadia, Beyond Sunset and Barely Breathing.
I was the main level designer and unofficial project lead of the development team for much of its lifetime. The game ultimately dissolved following internal power struggles compounded by general stress and disenfranchisement.
The general outline of the game followed The Anomaly, a superhuman sorcerer trapped on a dystopian far future Earth in the grimy heart of Bacillus City - the last remaining civilization on the planet. Earth had been "Deluged" and was in the process of being overtaken and terraformed by monsters from another dimension. The player's goal was to escape the city, fight through its surrounding wasteland, travel into the other world and uncover the truth of what caused this whole mess to begin with.
The gameplay was intended to have a quasi-immersive sim philosophy, putting emphasis on player creativity, environmental interaction and emergent moments. Instead of a hierarchical weapon system, the player would instead dovetail their firepower with their magical abilities, movement and manipulation of their surroundings to get by. There would be a Half-Life-style attention to detail in environment design and a strong presence of physics in gameplay (or whatever passes for physics in Doom) to bring the game world to life.
The player's opponents were planned to have believable behavior such as the more animalistic monsters protecting their young, food chains/social hierarchies, armed foes utilizing squad tactics, tribes that controlled territory and most monsters attempting to run away in fear when they are at low health.
All of this was technically achieved, albeit in a heavily watered down compromise due to GZDoom's limitations.
Deluge's development process was a continuous mess laden with feature creep, technical limitations, constantly changing ideas (a recurring issue was that we were keen on experimenting with everything since we didn't want to miss any potential opportunities and so a lot of content was not valued as much as it should have been), internal conflicts and external pressure from an audience who believed that we were further along the road to completion than we really were.
While Deluge met a grizzly end I learned a lot over the two and a half years spent with it, so in that regard it wasn't a complete waste.
Concept art of Bacillus City, exploring an "Alien Gothic" style, during a period in development when the city was directly controlled by the Deluged forces from the get-go.
Concept art of the Wasteland, created via extensive photobashing.
This character, known as "The Witch", never fully realized during development and this concept art was completed after the project had fell through. She was intended to be another of the player character's race and an ambiguous ally/enemy.
The starting area of the game - the laboratory wing of a sinister underground bunker belonging to the mysterious High Council of Bacillus City.
A computer room in the bunker.
The Deluged "meat" flora growing in view of the player's Lantern ability and N.M.E. Device weapon.
An "elder" looming in a small storage chamber.
A bridge across a massive underground sewage canal under Bacillus City. This would have been the first major visual "wow moment" of the game.
Deluged growths in the slums of Bacillus City. The slums never had consistent art direction and became a bloated mess of incoherent level geometry as time went on.
An underground transport tunnel leading from Bacillus City to The Wasteland.
The Bacillus City skyline seen from the Wasteland. This design of it was made entirely with level geometry in the 3D skybox and was intended to be replaced with 3D models for better optimization.
An industrial facility on the coastal outskirts of Bacillus City. Clearly inspired by the Air Exchange location from Half-Life 2 concept art.
The Flaregun in action.
A water treatment plant. In earlier builds this location was a sewage treatment plant.
Throwing a "Rioter" off a dam with Bacillus City's power station in the background.
A tram terminal in the power station. This area would feature a large battle against a horde of monsters with many explosive barrels scattered about.
The interior of the power station's waste disposal chamber.
A control room in the Sealabs hidden under the power station.
The alternate fire of the N.M.E Device in action.
A medical bay in the Sealab. Specimens of previously unseen Delgued species indicate prior contact between the Deluge and Earth.
The "Underworld" from where the Deluge spawned from. Abstract horror was the primary focus of this location concept.