Fortune's Run - retro FPS inspired by Quake, Deus Ex and E.Y.E - now available on Early Access

[Arthandas]

This looks really interesting. It somehow manages to keep its own distinct identity in the ocean of recent boomer shooters.

 

[Darkozric]

Donut Touch What the fuck, is this shit episodic?

 

[good fucking shit happen]

Donut Touch What the fuck, is this shit episodic?

Looking at the end screen again it seems like they're going to go for that same model so many games are stuck in these days. So they're probably going to release the first part on Early Access and then get stuck in development hell and never get anything done. Read and weep, brutha: Fortune's Run ACT I. So it ain't going to be episodic like HL2 Episodes was, as in you buy every single episode, but as good as. Did this shit ever work out other than in Might & Magic? Cuz the first game in that series was titled Book One and that's the one time I can think of that actually being followed up on properly.

This game is stylish as fuck btw. Art and music is a class act, rare as fuck for these old-school shooters.

 

[Darkozric]

This game is stylish as fuck btw. Art and music is a class act, rare as fuck for these old-school shooters.

I saw your pics on the screenshots thread and I instantly thought this is the shit. But the fucking episodic model is cringe anti-boner material. I'll keep an eye on it, but for now fuck them.

 

[good fucking shit happen]

But the fucking episodic model is cringe anti-boner material.

You'd think devs would understand how off-putting this is to consumers after how many times this model has failed. Nobody wants to get invested in Shadowrealm Darkness Rising: Chapter I: Act I: Part I: The Prologue when the followup to that might not only never get released, but it leaves you hanging with on whatever cliffhanger they cooked up and not nearly enough levels and content to feel satisfied with it.

 

[orcinator]

They got the horribly grimy 90s sci-fi atmosphere is down perfect.

Gave it a try to see if you are correct, saw dreadlocks, clearly you are.

Other notes:
Took a while to figure out if the main character is a girl or some sort of alien funnygender.
Wait a minute, the shape of the Blaster Gun, is this a star wars reference?
Oh look it's the Far Cry thing where you fall down from a great height then heal the damage by pulling a bullet out of your arm.

 

[DZ_TeamFortune]

Hey! Dev here. I just found this thread and I wanted to make some stuff public about the episodes thing.

We want to make a pretty long game. I'm talking like, 50 hours plus long. Unfortunately that's a huge undertaking for a studio with no proofs, limited resources and no budget, so instead we decided to take all that story and those level concepts and chunk it up into "acts."

The goal is to make each act have a similar amount of content to a "normal" 2-person team indie release. They're going to have meaningful story resolutions and decent content. I guess the messaging around EA/episodic is pretty fucked up, but if you've played the demo already you should know that a single of our levels occupies pretty long runtime. Some of the playtesters took more time to finish the demo than you get in some full releases :/ I mean really it's no different from Fortune's Run 1, then Fortune's Run 2, and so on. We're just calling them acts.

I understand why people shit bricks when they hear early access or episodic releases. I just think that anyways if a project isn't even able to hit a partial release it would have never hit a full release either. Those projects you're seeing fail in EA probably would have also shit the bed if they just tried to sprint to a full release. So, yes, we're going to work on the game gradually and we'll release what we have as we make it. That way, even if we end up selling 0 copies and this whole thing becomes a gigantic trash fire, at least we'll have released something.

And you won't get a shitty 1 hour long EA release with a single level and no enemies in it. I promise you that. I'm not hitting publish on anything until we've played it and made sure it's fun. I'm making this game because I want to see shit like this get made!

 

[orcinator]

Hey! Dev here. I just found this thread and I wanted to make some stuff public about the episodes thing.

We want to make a pretty long game. I'm talking like, 50 hours plus long. Unfortunately that's a huge undertaking for a studio with no proofs, limited resources and no budget, so instead we decided to take all that story and those level concepts and chunk it up into "acts."

The goal is to make each act have a similar amount of content to a "normal" 2-person team indie release. They're going to have meaningful story resolutions and decent content. I guess the messaging around EA/episodic is pretty fucked up, but if you've played the demo already you should know that a single of our levels occupies pretty long runtime. Some of the playtesters took more time to finish the demo than you get in some full releases :/ I mean really it's no different from Fortune's Run 1, then Fortune's Run 2, and so on. We're just calling them acts.

I understand why people shit bricks when they hear early access or episodic releases. I just think that anyways if a project isn't even able to hit a partial release it would have never hit a full release either. Those projects you're seeing fail in EA probably would have also shit the bed if they just tried to sprint to a full release. So, yes, we're going to work on the game gradually and we'll release what we have as we make it. That way, even if we end up selling 0 copies and this whole thing becomes a gigantic trash fire, at least we'll have released something.

And you won't get a shitty 1 hour long EA release with a single level and no enemies in it. I promise you that. I'm not hitting publish on anything until we've played it and made sure it's fun. I'm making this game because I want to see shit like this get made!

I'll give my feedback at some point but right now why not ump through whatever hoops this site requires to give you a dev tag.
Also make it so you can skip to the end of the results screen, it took like a full minute to finish showing all the stats.

 

[good fucking shit happen]

I'm making this game because I want to see shit like this get made!

Hey hey people dev! We want this dope game get made too, fo shizzle. Best old school shooter content out there so far hands down. The episodic thing is more of a marketing issue than anything else in your case if you plan to make it decently meaty. Had more fun with your demo than playing the entirety of Cultic (Chapter I), that's value man. This Fortunehead is looking forward to his next fix.

 

[good fucking shit happen]

Shillbump, if that fucking admin asshole can do it then so can I.

 

[Rocket-Propelled Game]

>Reads the Steam page for the game

>Marketing blurb: "A classic FPS with undertones of role-playing in the spirit of Deus Ex and EYE: Divine Cybermancy, featuring the campy tone of space operas and titles like Metal Gear Solid."

>The mature content warning: "Contains graphic violence, drug and alcohol abuse, themes involving human trafficking and sexual assault. An option will be included to censor direct reference to sexual assault and extreme gore. "

Am I the only one that thinks something doesn't add up here and am getting legit uncomfy vibes?

 

[HoboForEternity]

steam next fest is here and i tried the demo. i didnt finish the demo proper, but got around an hour of playtime and i think in the climax of the demo because i dont want to spoil the game further.
impression:

great:
great combat imo, very weighty melee and parry system, actually one of the most responsive first person melee system i have ever played. each hit that damage enemy register with satisfying sound effect and blood splatter. each block clash with satisfying cling clangs and screen shake effect. the same with parkour. they did a great job with the combat and movement sytem, very fast, can be stealthy and tactical at the same time. they cited doom , quake, deus ex, etc as inspiration and they did take the inspiration well. using melee on enemy with armor head on you likely will be blocked or parried, but by using speed, or stealth i love parkouring across walls and outmanuever enemies then attacking them from behind. with multiple enemies in a room, surprise one from behind, take it as meatshield, then shoot the other enemies. if your meatshield die, jump again, and finish the last one with melee. like in trailer, you can cut a gas pipe, lure enemy there then burn them when they pass the gas leak.

there are social hub too where you can talk to people. didnt get any quest or discovered any at least, but most NPCs spew generic line, but few NPCs do have extensive dialogue options.

ok: hacking is cool but i can see it getting old fast. it's basically old style DOS command. to login you need to type 'login [username] [password] instead of proper prompt like deus ex. even the computer commands need to be typed manually. to open list of command you need to type "help" then for example, to view a camera you need to summon the camera id then type manually the camera web adress like this: "viewcam viewcam cam-server-101.vheninet"

kinda dislike: the art, not that it's horrbile for me but the color pallete makes it hard to see things in detail but overall it's still ok and doesnt give me physical pain like cruelty squad did.

the font, now they really need to change the font. it's even worse than underrail's vanilla circa 2015 font in term of readability. there is no proper UI scaling, so play at most at 1080p instead whatever your native is. at least for me because i play on the couch TV.

overall very promising game, glad i tried the demo

 

[430am]

I played the demo and it's fucking awesome, can't wait for it to come out. One of the few retro-inspired FPS that are actually very competent and iterate on the classic gameplay with new fun systems.

 

[HoboForEternity]

I played the demo and it's fucking awesome, can't wait for it to come out. One of the few retro-inspired FPS that are actually very competent and iterate on the classic gameplay with new fun systems.

on steam dev said early access by september ish. really looking forward to this now.

 

[Tacgnol]

I agree with HoboForEternity's impressions.

Visual clarity is one of the biggest issues right now, but they may improve it.

 

[Modron]

Just pointing out that it's probably not a time limited demo since it has been available for at least a year now. Not saying they didn't update it or that it won't disappear on release, just that you probably don't have to rush out and play it.

 

[orcinator]

Oh no the feedback, I got so caught up in what I was doing I forgot all about it....
Thankfully I can just say I agree with most of what the guy above said except

using melee on enemy with armor head on you likely will be blocked or parried

because I was able to easily mash the basic enemies to death, in fact the cataner felt a bit weak as "mash to grapple, mash to beat face" was more effective. As far as I remember at least.
Hopefully we'll get some Jedi enemies that block bullets and require you to actually be gud at melee to beat.
Also I didn't particularly like the inventory, the Far Cry but 2d animations get boring after a while and make you waste time if you take heavy damage.

 

[whydoibother]

Demo is back up.
Some Anon was shilling this on /v/, and at least in the screenshots he posted it seemed very brown&rust.
Also it looks like you can't in a millisecond tell what is an enemy, what is a projectile/explosion, and what is terrain decoration.

Any thoughts? I'll play it later regardless, just want to get some early opinions.

 

[udm]

Played the demo for about 2 hours. Not sold on this. Visually it's too crowded. Gameplay-wise, at higher difficulties guns are less effective due to melee's ability to stunlock enemies (and, oddly, as orcinator pointed out, fists are better than katana at times because they recover from blocked attacks faster), so you have the same problem as Shadow Warrior 2013 where guns are almost always useless compared to melee. It's a nice touch that a lot of environmental objects are interactive (even plants can catch fire), but IMO there's not a lot of open-endedness. I know DX was cited as an inspiration, but this feels more like Strife. It's pretty linear from what I've played so far.

EDIT: I like that it's very challenging on Rare difficulty though. They're not joking about the difficulty descriptions.

EDIT2: Looking through the dev's twitter, seems like there are some tricks with the katana that I didn't know about. Maybe I've been too hasty in my judgment? I should give it a try again tomorrow when I'm less tired.

EDIT3: Oh yeah it's pretty funny that you can commit suicide by trapping yourself in a clothes dryer

 

[Morgoth]

This is a Prey 2 (the canceled one) on the cheap. Not sold on it either.

 

[LarryTyphoid]

On the autogynephilic boomer shooter scale, I rate this an Ion Fury out of Viscerafest.

 

[Sibylla]

Vaguely remember playing a similar demo. Is this the same game where the MC and the tutorial guide are furry self insert of the devs and the first sequence is going into a bar to learn that you used to be a sex worker?

 

[Gerrard]

I tried the demo, got defeated by the tutorial exam. Game's way too fast for what it's trying to do with enemy sprites way too coarse and their 3 frame "animations" awful indicators of what the enemy is doing. Too old for this shit.
Also, if you think that having to press a second key while jumping adds some kind of "skill" to the gameplay, you've got issues.

 

[Beowulf]

Well, on the steam store it has the "Immersive Sim" tag, that the devs try to stick to almost every FPS game, but Fortune's Run is just this - a linear FPS game.
Don't know what inspiration they took from Deus Ex, but certainly it wasn't the approach to level design and ability to solve problems in multiple ways.
Like someone mentioned here already - it's just a really fast paced linear shooter with interspersed arenas (judging from the demo level) that takes more cues from Duke, than whatever immsim name they throw in as an inspiration.
That's not bad in itself, but after playing the demo I dropped it out from my wishlist.

 

[HoboForEternity]

judging too soon imo, i hope the levels do open up later.