Decay: Tempus (Looking for 3D artists)

hogsy

Hi there!

We're a small team working on a free open-source indie game called Decay, which is inspired by games such as Unreal, Quake and other first-person shooters from the 90s. What we're essentially aiming to achieve is a new first-person shooter with a rather simple graphical style (by todays standards) that also nods games from many years ago, classic shooters.

The game takes place in a distant downtrodden future, in which the player assumes the role of a young teacher in weaponry (who ironically has never touched a gun in his life), called Hiyazaki, whom gets caught up in "saving the world" - nah, just trying to save his own skin.

We're pretty flexible within the team, everyone has access to the design documents for the game and can make any changes they like (so long as we're all in agreement.) While the story has been somewhat established, anyone else joining the team is welcome to add their own changes into the mix. The idea is that it's your game just as much as it is ours.

The game features seven different weapons at the moment, most of which have already been modelled out but just need some additional clean up work. We're trying to be pretty creative about NPCs in the game and items; the health kit for example doesn't quite work the same way as most people may be used to, heh.

Additionally the game also features a cooperative mode, where two players can make their way through the game together, but we have no plans at the moment on adding support for a competitive multiplayer mode. We feel that there's more value in working primarily on the singleplayer mode.

Team?

We're a team of two programmers, two level designers, one voice actor, one texture artist, two music artists and one concept artist. There's five of us but as you can see we all cover a wide range of different professions, so to speak.

You've probably noticed we're lacking a modeller; over the course of last year we began working with someone on creating new models for the project, however he decided to move on and we're now a little lost until we find someone else interested in working with us.

Technicalities!

Decay is using a heavily modified version of the Quake engine dubbed 'Katana' which has been in development alongside the game for about 5 years now, on and off. 

It has a rather extensive feature list but in regards to modelling, currently it only supports Quake II's MD2 model format, so it's obviously a plus if you've had experience with exporting to that format before and are aware of its limitations; that said we're looking to implement support for more robust model formats very soon (but generally content is intended to remain low-poly 90s style design.)

The engine is written in a mix of C and C++, and the game logic is written in C. You could probably think of Katana as a package of modules; Engine, Menu, Game, Launcher and Platform. While programming experience isn't required, it's obviously a plus.

The engine supports a fairly comprehensive scripted material system and you essentially have complete control over how everything is drawn on the screen (including support for detail textures, sphere-mapping, fullbrights, rotating textures, scrolling textures and you name it).



We're also developing an editor for the engine, particularly so that it's easier to develop materials. The editor currently features a simple model viewer, WYSIWYG material editor and some other minor functionality, but importantly the engine is integrated into the editor so all your content appears the same in the editor as it would in the game.

There's minor support for shaders but these currently aren't controllable from the material scripts, but it's a planned feature if we can get round to it.

I'm Interested!

If you've made it this far and you're interested then that's fantastic. If you'd like to get in contact with us, some of the team idles in the #decay channel on QuakeNet though I'm not around until later in the day (around 6PM UK time).

The best way to get in touch is likely either by joining the IRC channel or you can email me at markelswo@gmail.com

Feel free to let me know if you have any questions, I'll likely be adding more screenshots of the project to the thread at a later date.

hogsy

As promised, here are a few work-in-progress screenshots of E1M1 which SavageX has been working on. Compared to Quake and actually, most other games honestly, the levels in Decay are huge and there's a lot of exploration to be had through just the first two levels alone.

We're currently looking at filling these levels up with plenty of fauna, wildlife and other elements for players to interact with.