KickStarter BLACKROOM, an oldschool FPS from John Romero and Adrian Carmack - Kickstarter cancelled!

[Space Insect]

I personally liked the weapons in Daikatana. They were all pretty varied and they used the time-travelling to make some cool wrapons.

 

[pippin]

Tried to install Daikatana via Steam and got a virus warning

 

[fizzelopeguss]

Save us nigga.

Anyone else more interested to see what Adrian Carmacks art looks like now?

 

[LESS T_T]

Kickstarter is here. You can pay to be his bitch: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nightworkgames/blackroom-a-new-fps-from-romero-and-carmack

John Romero and Adrian Carmack reunite to make BLACKROOM, a visceral, action-packed FPS set in a holographic simulation gone rogue.

John Romero and fellow id Software co-founder Adrian Carmack proudly announce BLACKROOM™, a visceral, varied and violent shooter that harkens back to classic FPS play with a mixture of exploration, speed, and intense, weaponized combat. Use fast, skillful movement to dodge enemy attacks, circle-strafe your foes, and rule the air as you rocket jump in the single- and multiplayer modes. BLACKROOM launches with unique multiplayer maps and robust modding support for the community to make diabolical creations of their own design - Coming Winter 2018 to PC!

• Platform - PC (DRM Free + Steam) and Mac
• Release Date - Winter 2018
• Genre - FPS
• Single-Player Campaign - 10 Hours, Leaderboard Challenge Modes
• Multiplayer - Co-op, 1-on-1 Deathmatch, Arena
• Multiplayer Maps - 6 Built In + Community Maps
• Fully Moddable, Run Dedicated Servers, Create Maps
• New Soundtrack by acclaimed metal guitarist George Lynch

BLACKROOM is the FPS you have been waiting for: a return to fast, violent and masterful play on the PC. In BLACKROOM, you reign supreme in a variety of multiplayer modes, including co-op, 1-on-1 deathmatch and free-for-all arena in a motley mix of locations including hardcore military sims, hellish infernos and interstellar space. If you prefer a single-player experience, delve into an intense 10+ hour campaign, spanning wildly varied environments, from ruined Victorian mansions to Wild West ghost towns to treacherous pirate galleons and beyond.

BLACKROOM is the FPS you know we can make. Master fast, skillful movement with rocket jumping, strafe jumping and circle strafing. Wield intricately balanced weapons where each one has a specific use and does the damage that makes you feel good. Challenge yourself with expert abstract level design, invented and perfected by John Romero and fully realized by Adrian Carmack’s dark and unique style. Master six built-in multiplayer maps, as well as countless maps created by the community. In BLACKROOM, Romero is designing every level.

BLACKROOM is what the FPS community asked for. Community is and has always been at the core of FPS, and BLACKROOM allows for an incredible range of modding opportunities. Beyond the levels in the game, extend your experience with full mod support (no additional DLC or subscriptions) and dedicated servers. Put your skills to the test in Challenge Modes (speedrunning and more) that present unique and demanding goals.

BLACKROOM is unique because it is shifting. Change your environment from within the game with the proprietary Boxel, a device only allocated to HOXAR engineers. Influence the environment, your weapons and your enemies.

BLACKROOM is metal. It features a new soundtrack and compositions by acclaimed metal guitarist George Lynch, frequently cited as one of the best metal guitarists in the world.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

nm...

 

[skacky]

Meh, not a single screenshot or gameplay video, even as a prototype. I think I'll pass.
Setting does remind me of Daikatana with the different environments and the cyberpunk element.

 

[pippin]

From Slayer to George Lynch, huh... Lynch's an alright guitarist, but some might doubt his metal credentials

 

[Melan]

Meh, not a single screenshot or gameplay video, even as a prototype. I think I'll pass.
Setting does remind me of Daikatana with the different environments and the cyberpunk element.

Yeah, so far it's not much more than a vague "John Romero will gently hold your hands and look dreamily into your eyes. Perhaps."

May back when and if they release more substantial gameplay / level design info. So far, we know the story (almost as important in a classical FPS as it is in porn), we know the designers and we know they are making it in Ireland, but the rest is basically "it is a fast-paced game with circle strafing and rocket jump".

 

[Infinitron]

 

[dunno lah]

http://www.develop-online.net/inter...-enables-me-to-do-anything-at-anytime/0219632

The Doom co-creator tells us how FPS fans will help design his new game, and why he's ignoring all other shooters

John Romero is back.

The man who co-created Doom and helped to define the FPS genre is working on a brand new shooter Blackroom, with the help of his Night Work Games team and fellow Id Software co-founder Adrian Carmack.

The title, which was announce today, aims to recreate the classic, fast-paced action Romero's past games have been known for, all set in Holodeck-style settings that – in his own words – allow the designer to "do anything at anytime".

With this vast, blank canvas ahead of him, we caught up with Romero to find out why Blackroom will redefine the first-person shooter.

Blackroom has a seemingly wide variety of settings. How do you plan to hold a game with variety together? What's the fiction you've used to justify the diverse environments?
So, first, everything that is happening is happening inside Blackroom. This is a company, Hoxar, that happens to deal in mixed realities. They have military sims and entertainment sims and many more. This gives us a huge range of options to play with.

However, what they also have is a pretty serious problem, and that problem is the unifying conflict that ties all this together. In order to address what’s happening in Blackroom, they have to explore where its happening at the source across these various HoloSims. Ultimately, all these things come together in the seriously abstract level design that is my for thing. Obviously, we have designed the game to play to our strengths.

In the game, the holodeck became a reality. Hoxar, keen to hold its edge, investigated and explored where they could go next — and that question led them to their latest innovation, Predictive Memory Technology. PMT was designed to make HoloSims as real as they could be by scanning the participants' memories and using those memories to craft personalized and more realistic experiences within individual HoloSims. A soldier who regularly feared a certain type of combat incident would be faced with issues to test it.

On the kinder side, PMT could recreate personalities from people’s memories of their loved ones so that they could have a conversation with them in Blackroom, a conversation that felt real. It was revolutionary. Unfortunately, it was also not without its flaws. PMT had not only the ability to 'read', it seems, but also the ability to permanently 'write'. Thus one person's nightmares became others, and all of these nightmares magnified over time, both inside and outside the simulation.

You’ve told us before that you plan to redefine the shooter with this title. What’s new about Blackroom?
The fiction in Blackroom enables anything to happen. Because you are inside a life-like holographic simulation, I can do anything at anytime. The fiction supports it. And taking advantage of this power will allow me to do things that no other FPS has done.

Some games, like Fear, are about the supernatural and have license to make anything appear at any time to scare the hell out of you. Blackroom's fiction has even more ability to surprise and astound the player as your entire location can change in an instant. There could be a point where the simulation is glitching and what you hear is not what you see. You could be trying to open a safe, let’s say, and as soon as you hear the safe click you are now inside a dark, damp room with a crushing ceiling coming down on you.

So, crazy things can happen. Luckily, you have the Boxel device on your wrist. This handy instrument will let you stop time, make the crushing ceiling disappear, dissolve it, and other abilities – the Boxel controls the Blackroom simulation. There will be very handy functions that you can hotkey for instant access. Firing weapons will be very important, of course, but using your Boxel could completely change the outcome of your situation.

With the game design that I just described, the mod community is going to have more power and variety than they’ve ever had in a game. The ability to create incredible levels that take players on a rollercoaster ride of an adventure, with almost every aspect moddable, is going to be great.

I know the kind of gameplay that I like, and my FPS audience likes, and that’s how I’m going to design Blackroom. Other shooters aren’t part of the equation.

You're working with Adrian Carmack. How did this reunion come about? Who approached who?
Well, Adrian and I have been friends since he started working at Softdisk in 1990. After meeting up at QuakeCon 2014, Adrian and I decided to talk again a couple months later in Ireland. During that meeting, we talked more and more of working on another shooter together, and decided to do it. The time was right.

Over the next year we talked some more about it and made it official about half a year ago.

What are the key aspects of classic first-person shooters you’re trying to recreate with Blackroom? How do you plan to accomplish this?
The key aspects are, of course, fast and skillful movement combined with well-balanced weapons that have a variety of attributes. Combine that with an array of enemy encounter scenarios from one-on-one to twenty incoming attacks and you have a fun, hectic style of gameplay. Place all of this inside abstract level design that focuses on intriguing architecture with good flow, thoughtful item placement, and plenty of secrets.

Shooters have changed a lot over the years. How do you plan to bring classic play to modern shooters?

I know it’s an obvious answer, but it’s by focusing on classic play. That is the core of the game and the single most important thing to us. The graphics will be modern, of course, and they have to look great, but there’s a point where it’s too much and starts to hurt the core of the game. I can focus more on audio as well now that I can stream as much as I like. Other than that, the gameplay of my past FPS games will work great today.

What have you seen in other shooters that you want to avoid? What do you want to improve on?
Actually, I’m not focusing on any other shooters and what to avoid. I know the kind of gameplay that I like, and my FPS audience likes, and that’s how I’m going to design Blackroom. Other shooters aren’t part of the equation.

How will you be working with the community? What role will they have in the game’s development (beyond the Kickstarter)?
There are several tiers that allow backers to contribute ideas for designs of weapons, monsters, props and more. There are also a lot of fun backer achievements that unlock new rewards, such as taking selfie pics with various games or in special locations. We’re really engaging with the fans during the campaign to make it a fun experience.

Ultimately, I think this whole thing really exists because of the community and their incredible devotion to FPSs over the years. If you check out the comments on The Return YouTube video or the comments on Twitter, you can see how excited the community is. FPS has always been about the community.

What tech will you be building this on? An established engine, or proprietary tech?
Unreal 4. I’m going to be focusing on blistering speed at a high framerate and a C-based engine is the right choice.

Why is it important to make the game fully moddable?
My FPS games have always been about allowing the community to have fun with the game in a wide variety of ways – extending it, adding to it, creating entire replacements for it. I look at the game, in a sense, as an engine of creativity. And nowadays with the complexity of modern engines, the difficulty of modding them is something I’m going to focus on making far easier without taking away the full power of moddability.

Because you are inside a life-like holographic simulation, I can do anything at anytime. The fiction supports it. And taking advantage of this power will allow me to do things that no other FPS has done.

Any hints in Tech Gone Bad about what we can expect to see (dev/design techniques) in Blackroom?
If you like that style of gameplay, then you know what to expect in Blackroom. I’ve always liked interesting architecture, the feeling of exploring a mysterious, dangerous place, being surprised, and the feeling of dominating a battle. Having all of this take place at once is the kind of experience that I really like in an FPS.

What’s the biggest thing you’ve learned from your respective careers and how are you applying this to Blackroom?
The kind of team you need to build a great game is the most important component of making a game. From there, it’s focus and discipline, and keeping the game fun. Coming into work and thinking, “How can I make something even cooler in the game today?” and how to keep pushing onward and upward. And, of course, having fun every day making a game. We have a great core team for Blackroom. Adrian and I have worked together, successfully, for years. The people joining us are likewise veterans.

 

[Melan]

Twitch is on.

 

[Infinitron]

Twitch stream: https://www.twitch.tv/theromero

 

[Lyric Suite]

From Slayer to George Lynch, huh... Lynch's an alright guitarist, but some might doubt his metal credentials

I never even heard of George Lynch before:



Guess it is better than getting a nobody? I don't know.

I don't get what this holoshit means. Guess that's as good an excuse as any to have varied environments without having to explain why you are fighting in a medieval castle one moment, and a futuristic base another. Which i'm fine with, who gives a shit about thematic continuity.

 

[Zed]

where's the fucking gameplay

 

[pippin]

Lynch was in Dokken, one of the few hair metal bands that had actual musicians in them.

 

[Excidium II]

Nice gameplay.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Unreal 4 confirmed.

 

[Excidium II]

I don't know they are bothering with MP.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.pcgamer.com/john-romeros...e-moddable-holodeck-inspired-by-90s-shooters/

John Romero’s new FPS puts you in an insane, moddable holodeck inspired by '90s shooters

Last week id Software co-founders John Romero and Adrian Carmack announced they were making a first-person shooter. Today they’ve launched a Kickstarterfor that project, Blackroom, and unveiled the first hard details.

Blackroom is pitched in part as a return to ‘90s FPSes, described as “a visceral, varied and violent shooter … with a mixture of exploration, speed, and intense, weaponized combat.” The Kickstarter page plays up “skillful” FPS movement techniques like circle-strafing and rocket-jumping and mentions levels with “secret rooms and twisted hidden passageways.” More generally, it’ll be a multiplayer and single-player game for PC and Mac that we’ll see in Winter 2018.

Interestingly, Romero and Carmack don’t seem to intend to rehash Doom or Quake’s satanic themes. Blackroom’s premise is unique and ambitious: fight through a wide variety of settings rendered by an advanced, Holodeck-like technology gone awry (is there any other kind of Holodeck, really?) created by a company called HOXAR. The 10+ hour single-player campaign casts you as an HOXAR engineer, sent in to investigate and debug “troubling anomalies” in Blackroom, chiefly its recent propensity for blending reality and virtual reality as it scans users’ happy and unhappy memories to create simulations.

Blackroom also doesn’t seem to be solely focused on violence and exploration. Your character carries a HOXAR device called the “Boxel,” which “allows you to control the simulation—stop time, see through walls, remove obstacles, activate various types of UI in the world, and other functions,” according to Romero. It’s unclear exactly how the Boxel will operate—whether it’ll only be able to interact with specific objects, for example.

“There is much about Blackroom that is new and different than past shooters,” John Romero told us via email. “The gameplay itself is going to feel classic, but it will be in an entirely new design wrapper. It will be using a brand-new engine [Unreal 4] with physically-based materials and shaders. This gives us a tremendous amount of design and creative freedom.”

On the surface, Blackroom sounds a bit like Doom thrown into a Holodeck, perhaps also influenced by The Magic Circle. What’s most exciting to me about the project is the way its premise folds neatly into the promised moddability of the game. Blackroom vows to transport players to “ruined Victorian mansions to wild-west ghost towns to swashbuckling pirate galleons and beyond,” but the notion of holographic worlds means that user-created maps could essentially exist as canon. “The initial idea behind the holotech was to look into the future at what a real virtual simulation technology would be like that would enable a game to be extremely varied and control the player’s environment second-to-second,” says Romero. “My goal was to create a fiction that matched or exceeded Half-Life’s ability to materialize Vortigaunts right in front of you, or F.E.A.R.’s ability to make ghosts appear anywhere at any time. With Blackroom’s fiction, Adrian and I have the ability to do anything, and we plan to take advantage of that.”

A few pieces of concept art hint at the projects primordial state, for which Romero, Carmack, and the rest of Night Work Games are asking $700,000 on Kickstarter. Tune into Romero's Twitch channel later today from 12 p.m. to 2 p.m. EDT for more details.

 

[Lyric Suite]

I don't know they are bothering with MP.

He's already going full Daikatana throwing around all sorts of crazy ideas, but it remains to be seen how much of that crap actually makes it into the game.

 

[Zed]

Lynch was in Dokken, one of the few hair metal bands that had actual musicians in them.

dokken, huh. not quite dekkar.

 

[Hobo Elf]

I hope they just go for pure shooter gameplay but it sounds like they are going to add some gimmicky layer of shit with the hacking/glitching.

 

[Lyric Suite]

No QTEs. The chat hast spoken.

 

[United Nations]

Save us nigga.

Anyone else more interested to see what Adrian Carmacks art looks like now?

His hair is more beautiful in real life.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

I hope they just go for pure shooter gameplay but it sounds like they are going to add some gimmicky layer of shit with the hacking/glitching.

It sounds like he played Raven's Singularity, which was the last decent FPS released.

 

[United Nations]

I really hope that Romero + Carmack deliver as they should.

John Carmack & id have been fizzling out for some time now.

 

[Infinitron]

Kickstarter is performing rather tepidly, I'm afraid.

 

[4249]