Redoubt: Project-X looking for an artist or two
Hi everyone,
Redoubt: Project-X (working title) is a side-scrolling action game set around 350 years in the future. The basic premise is that humankind has finally developed faster-than-light technology and begun colonising a new planet a few thousand light years away to ease the burden of an overpopulated Earth, the strain of which is threatening to explode into either a huge global conflict or catastrophic economic collapse. However, with the United Nations still based back on Earth, the gateways difficult and expensive to run continuously and the challenges of enforcing the law across such large distances, the colonies have started squabbling over territory and resources on the new planet unsupervised. Soon each colony has joined one of two alliances, either voluntarily or under threat, and inevitably a full-blown war has broken out.
You play as a soldier in this conflict who, after proving themselves in battle, has been chosen for a highly controversial programme of human enhancement, under assurances that it is safe and will help turn the tide of the war. Without an effective international or intergalactic community to intervene, these experiments and procedures have become increasingly dangerous and ambitious, and you eventually find out what the real price you and your comrades have paid in becoming more than human.
A full story has been put together, and if this game is received well I would like to explore the possibility of turning it into a wider IP, producing further games in the same universe.
The main aim of this project however is to get a team together, gain some experience and have some fun. If the finished product is worthy of putting on Steam then we can look into it, but this is about a no-pressure environment for people to work on their portfolios, get their names on a finished product at the end of it and maybe make some new friends.
This means that things are being kept simple to reduce the workload as much as possible. Story development will be done through on-screen dialogue rather than full-blown cinematic cut-scenes and Ive been putting together a simple but flexible system for mappers to create enemies and script their behaviour. Environments will be attractive but quick to assemble. There may be co-op if we feel it will work and wont require a huge amount of redesign, but its a nice to have rather than a core feature.
Current planned features are:
The current team consists of myself doing programming and level design, and I have a great sound engineer doing foley effects and the music. I have a reasonable amount of multidisciplinary programming experience (Mostly Java, C++, PL/SQL and UnrealScript), and I have built up a decent knowledge of the UDK API (Im not an expert yet though!). You can see my work so far in the demo video below.You can find some of my sound guys work here: http://www.youtube.com/user/pablomanali. He's put together a theme for another game we were working on in the Redoubt universe that is on temporary hiatus as it was probably a little ambitious for a first project...
Asides from some balancing and tweaking, the gameplay side of things is largely done. That said, I will be continuing to create custom Kismet nodes as the levels require, to help script the enemies and environments and extend the current features where necessary. Below is a video demonstrating the current features with a simple tutorial level and demo gameplay level. Note that asides from the shotgun noise, this doesnt contain any custom assets!
[ame="
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28HjyB2Oh1k"]Redoubt: Project-X Gameplay Demo - YouTube[/ame]
What we would like are one or two artists to work on the character and weapon models, particle effects and the HUD elements (which I will put together in Scaleform or Canvas) and an environmental artist or level designer to help build the levels and work on the assets. Doesn't matter if you're inexperienced, as mentioned this is a fun learning project for people to work on their skills, just some enthusiasm will do.
If youre interested then please do PM me or reply to this thread and I'm happy to answer any and all questions (except the one about where babies come from). Even if all you can spare is a couple of hours a week, this will be a chance to build up your portfolio and make some new friends
Thanks,
Richard
Redoubt: Project-X (working title) is a side-scrolling action game set around 350 years in the future. The basic premise is that humankind has finally developed faster-than-light technology and begun colonising a new planet a few thousand light years away to ease the burden of an overpopulated Earth, the strain of which is threatening to explode into either a huge global conflict or catastrophic economic collapse. However, with the United Nations still based back on Earth, the gateways difficult and expensive to run continuously and the challenges of enforcing the law across such large distances, the colonies have started squabbling over territory and resources on the new planet unsupervised. Soon each colony has joined one of two alliances, either voluntarily or under threat, and inevitably a full-blown war has broken out.
You play as a soldier in this conflict who, after proving themselves in battle, has been chosen for a highly controversial programme of human enhancement, under assurances that it is safe and will help turn the tide of the war. Without an effective international or intergalactic community to intervene, these experiments and procedures have become increasingly dangerous and ambitious, and you eventually find out what the real price you and your comrades have paid in becoming more than human.
A full story has been put together, and if this game is received well I would like to explore the possibility of turning it into a wider IP, producing further games in the same universe.
The main aim of this project however is to get a team together, gain some experience and have some fun. If the finished product is worthy of putting on Steam then we can look into it, but this is about a no-pressure environment for people to work on their portfolios, get their names on a finished product at the end of it and maybe make some new friends.
This means that things are being kept simple to reduce the workload as much as possible. Story development will be done through on-screen dialogue rather than full-blown cinematic cut-scenes and Ive been putting together a simple but flexible system for mappers to create enemies and script their behaviour. Environments will be attractive but quick to assemble. There may be co-op if we feel it will work and wont require a huge amount of redesign, but its a nice to have rather than a core feature.
Current planned features are:
-
30 levels which take around 5-10 minutes to complete, leading to a 3-5 hour playtime depending on the skill of the player and whether they go hunting for secrets or not
-
Simple checkpoint system. Checkpoints in each level will store current player progress, but will not be saved if the player quits. Completed levels will be available to replay as much as they like and completing a level unlocks the next one to play. Things like player health, ammo and weapons will be reset to defaults at the beginning of each level.
-
Various powerups and weapons to encourage the player to explore, harder difficulty levels will require the player to use them (unless theyre REALLY good)
-
FUN!
The current team consists of myself doing programming and level design, and I have a great sound engineer doing foley effects and the music. I have a reasonable amount of multidisciplinary programming experience (Mostly Java, C++, PL/SQL and UnrealScript), and I have built up a decent knowledge of the UDK API (Im not an expert yet though!). You can see my work so far in the demo video below.You can find some of my sound guys work here: http://www.youtube.com/user/pablomanali. He's put together a theme for another game we were working on in the Redoubt universe that is on temporary hiatus as it was probably a little ambitious for a first project...
Asides from some balancing and tweaking, the gameplay side of things is largely done. That said, I will be continuing to create custom Kismet nodes as the levels require, to help script the enemies and environments and extend the current features where necessary. Below is a video demonstrating the current features with a simple tutorial level and demo gameplay level. Note that asides from the shotgun noise, this doesnt contain any custom assets!
[ame="
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28HjyB2Oh1k"]Redoubt: Project-X Gameplay Demo - YouTube[/ame]What we would like are one or two artists to work on the character and weapon models, particle effects and the HUD elements (which I will put together in Scaleform or Canvas) and an environmental artist or level designer to help build the levels and work on the assets. Doesn't matter if you're inexperienced, as mentioned this is a fun learning project for people to work on their skills, just some enthusiasm will do.
If youre interested then please do PM me or reply to this thread and I'm happy to answer any and all questions (except the one about where babies come from). Even if all you can spare is a couple of hours a week, this will be a chance to build up your portfolio and make some new friends
Thanks,
Richard
Replies
How are you? I'm an aspiring Environment Artist, definitely down for working on some side projects to try and get my portfolio going with stuff not directly related to school, so if you're looking I'm in for sure. My sig should have a link to one of my sites (it's still a WIP,)
but you can also check me out at johnehresmann3d.wordpress.com
Look forward to hearing back from you soon.
Regards,
John Ehresmann