Selaco - A Doom engine FPS inspired by FEAR and the classics - now available on Early Access

[kepler]

I really liked that demo. Shotgun is fun and gibs satisfying. Animu asthetics are massive decline tho. Will have to alt tab when someone enters my room while playing this.

Wishlisted with a hope that some things will play better in the final product.

 

[toughasnails]

It is supposed to be inspired by the game FEAR, not the engine FEAR used. While the engine can affect some things, at the end of the day games can change it since it is open source (and GZDoom is very customizable without modifying it) - i hope you don't expect to shoot demons in Sonic Robo Blast 2 because it also uses a modified Doom engine :-P.

Just wait till he finds out about Total Chaos lol...

 

[Tacgnol]

I wonder, what made them think that using gzdoom engine would be a good idea?
Dusk used Quake-like aesthetic on purpose.
Prodeus does all the 2d-pixelated-sprites much better, than Selaco.
Amid Evil did clever thing, in reproducing how we boomers remember Hexen and Heretic - all pixelated, bustil amazingly beatiful.

Selaco, however, is weird. It does not copy any of the old games, and thus can't have the benefits of nostalgia. And without those rose-tinted goggles its just a pretty ugly shooter with Fear-like gameplay, while the original Fear itself looks much better.

GZDoom engine is pretty powerful from a scripting perspective. Might have been the ease of customising things.

 

[toughasnails]

GZDoom engine is pretty powerful from a scripting perspective. Might have been the ease of customising things.

This plus them already being familiar with the engine & tools. The people behind these commercial GZDoom projects generally have a lot prior experience in the Doom modding/mapping scene...

 

[Bad Sector]

AFAIK pretty much everyone uses Doom Builder nowadays which is a very easy level design tool.

Also i 100% disagree that it looks ugly - or that it plays like FEAR.

Spoiler

please don't tell me there is a slow motion mode i missed

 

[udm]

At Level 3 now and enjoying myself more as the demo progresses. I'm having fun, but it's not the best boomer shooter I've tried. The level design is lacking due to too many pointless corridors and rooms, but occasionally there are some interesting locations like the office section with lots of glass windows. The game has some good ideas, but doesn't make full use of those mechanics (eg flipping objects to provide cover).

Sound is punchy but lacks enemy feedback so you don't know when an enemy is nearby apart from their footsteps. The music is eh. Sometimes it plays, sometimes it cuts off (presumably to add tension in certain areas).

One thing worth mentioning, however: it's nice that it isn't an arena shooter. As enemy fire is deadly (at Captain difficulty), you get ripped apart in 3 seconds even at full health and armour when caught in a crossfire. Yeah fights have a good deal of intensity to them, and even a single stray bullet eats 15-20hp when you're without armour. In a way, it reminds me of the deadliness of Blood's enemies. You can't just rush into a room and RIP AND TEAR BRUTAL D44M STYLE.

Also, Dawn is perfect waifu.

Spoiler

TLDR: Would buy, but probably at 20% off. I prefer Ion Fury to this, but I think Selaco can still stand on its own merits. I just hope the later levels are more intriguing than the earlier ones.

How about that FEAR AI, is it 'inspired' enough to include that?

The AI is pretty good. Enemies flank so you can't camp and cheese them. There is still room for improvement though as they sometimes get stuck while pathfinding around geometry and objects.

Also, I did not find a "walk" button. I understand it's a fast paced shooter, but I like to walk when exploring. Maybe I'm blind, but where do I change the blood color to proper red?

You run by default, so the walk button is actually the "Run" button in the controls.

 

[HansDampf]

I played through the demo again on Admiral (before today's update). I think I'm getting the hang of this. The pistol is ideal to interrupt shotgunners. It always stuns no matter where you hit them. Combat is "dynamic" in the sense that you can rarely camp it out. It's better to keep moving and be more aggressive, in my experience.
The demo leaves me wanting more, so that's good. But I have a few issues with it.
1) With all the smoke and particle effects it's sometimes hard to see anything. It's better when I set the effects on Low, but that's kinda lame? I didn't have this problem in FEAR either. The devs seem to be aware of this and are working on it, according to the patch notes. It would be nice to have more audible and thumpy bullet impact sound effects when you hit enemies. It's better than relying on the crosshair indicator, and it should make the weapons feel more powerful.
2) Cut the amount of secrets in half (at least)! This seems like nitpicking, but I hate this inflation of secrets. I hate it in Ion Fury. And I hate it in Doom maps. I went through the level with a fine tooth comb, and at the end it says I'm still missing 10 secrets. I have no motivation to go back and find them all. There is no way any map designer has 20 cool ideas for secrets per map. Most of them are going to be pointless trash filler to annoy completionists. With the size of the first demo level, 3 secrets with useful rewards would be enough, imo.
3) Get rid of the youtubers. I have no issue with a few pop culture references in retro shooters. But seeing the face of "critics", who are supposed to review the game, everywhere in the demo looks no different to me than:

Spoiler

Also, Dawn is perfect waifu.

Spoiler

Despite having similar outfits and being supposedly more serious/realistic, Dawn looks way hotter than Shelly.

 

[Dayyālu]

Finally managed to play this and I discover that everything I could think of has already been said.

Basic gunplay is decent. That's the most important part in a shooter, and Selaco kinda nails it.

Weapon design is boring but functional. Sound is decent, nothing exceptional. The music is mediocre, feels almost random, System Shock 1 it ain't.

Enemy design is.... peculiar: I like how they're pretty reactive for Doom enemies and the enemy chatter (one of the few FEAR inspirations that they kept, I guess) but they're visually weak, difficult to identify properly in the level, little feedback when you hit them, the purple blood is ludicrous.... for once the level of detail and clutter in the levels work against the game: I'd prefer a visually clear industrial area where I can easily see enemies and cover.

HansDampf nails hit, too many secrets, many of them asinine, sign of a level designer that's more in love with pointless detail than with solid basics.

I have nothing against animu style for shooters - I survived Hedon's mess and I fully appreciate stuff like La Tailor Girl - but.... it feels off. I don't even know why, must be that the art is somewhat inconsistent at times or something, I had the weirdest feeling that I was replaying one of those oldass 90ies early 00ies weirdo western-animu games like Oni or SHOGO.

And I seriously don't want to remember Shogo.

I get the horrible feeling this could end up like Ion Fury: a lot of lovely work with mediocre basic design.

 

[Curratum]

sign of a level designer that's more in love with pointless detail than with solid basics.

That could be said about the level design as a whole. The game would play so much better if the detail was embedded in the walls, behind blocker lines, sort of like how you'd have exaggerated collision meshes on modern games, so you don't snag on every little piece of it.

 

[Bad Sector]

I had the weirdest feeling that I was replaying one of those oldass 90ies early 00ies weirdo western-animu games like Oni or SHOGO.

Oni has good visuals though, the only visual issue the game has is that the environments look too empty.

 

[Morenatsu.]

I had the weirdest feeling that I was replaying one of those oldass 90ies early 00ies weirdo western-animu games like Oni or SHOGO.

Oni has good visuals though, the only visual issue the game has is that the environments look too empty.

Oni is a Crapintosh game with consistently off-model animu art. Though that's at least still better Shogo's DeviantArt trash drawings.

 

[Bad Sector]

Oni is a Crapintosh game with consistently off-model animu art.

The game was also released on Windows.

Also i disagree with the "off-model" art, the game has good looking art, especially the 2D art.

I agree with Shogo's drawings too, you'd expect professional 2D artists to make something that at least looks decent. Amusingly, the only decent art in Shogo was made by a Japanese artist (on the left side, though the 3D model was... let down):

(left side is Shogo, right side is Oni)

 

[Morenatsu.]

Oni is a Crapintosh game with consistently off-model animu art.

The game was also released on Windows.

Also i disagree with the "off-model" art, the game has good looking art, especially the 2D art.

And on Playstation 2, but it's still a Macintosh game made within Macintosh limitations. Hence the simple lighting and sparse environments.

The 3D models and cover art look as good as they do, but the other bits of in-game art look a little odd. It's not a big problem by itself, but combined with the dub-acting, unnecessarily realistic level design, and Crapple graficks, it's a strange game to play. But then again, every Bungie game is like that. Marathon, with its funny sounds effects, and Halo, with its copypasta level derpsign, and all of them with checkpoints only because why not.

But, liek, Shogo, holeh sheeit. It's not really any better than Blood 2, it's just less frustrating/tedious. Brain-dead RNG combat and horrendous animu fartart instead of damage sponges and reused levels. I guess it's a slightly more finished game, but that's about it. Slave Zero was much better (but that's less animu and not first-person).

 

[Bad Sector]

And on Playstation 2, but it's still a Macintosh game made within Macintosh limitations. Hence the simple lighting and sparse environments.

At the time Oni was made Macintosh didn't have any limitation when it comes to graphics, they were basically PCs with a PowerPC CPU instead of an Intel one, at the turn of the century OpenGL was at its peak in terms of both performance and features and Macs used Nvidia-based GPUs which always had the best OpenGL implementation.

It wouldn't be until years later when they started focusing too much on "the thinnest ever" stuff and weird designs that performance would actually start becoming an issue, but that'd be a decade after Oni was made. Even the 2009 Mac Pro could get some very beefy GPUs (and in fact people who wanted high end graphics on a Mac preferred to buy refurbished/used 2009 Mac Pros with high end GeForces - Nvidia kept releasing drivers even after Apple decided to go with AMD).

Being on PlayStation 2 while being in development before the console was released was a more likely reason for the sparse environments than being on Mac (though i'm not sure if that was actually the case - i just think it is more likely than Mac being the issue).

 

[toughasnails]

Funny thing, the boring environments in Oni were probably what the people complained about the most but they were actually marketed as a selling point before the release. They were boasting that the levels are designed by pro architects. Turns out that the sort of architecture you see in modern office buildings and the like doesn't make for something that is interesting to look at in your game.

 

[Bad Sector]

TBH i think that "designed by pro architects" was kind at the same level as how Valve's facial animation system was supposedly designed by psychologists - which does have some kernel of truth at a level (AFAIK it is based on some system from psychology which predates the game -and the vast majority of computer games- by decades) but at the end of the day IIRC the system was made by the same guy who did the skeletal animation system in HL1.

I think the main reason Oni levels feel empty is that for the gameplay to work you need a lot of space to run and do various combos (and throw people, etc), so they had to made the areas large for that, but they didn't try to add any additional detail that wouldn't affect the gameplay. That could be technical limitations (PS2) or manpower limitations (AFAIK it was more of a side project and was developed when MS bought Bungie so it is possible the team that actually worked on it was too small). Though that is just me guessing here.

 

[Dayyālu]

I think the main reason Oni levels feel empty is that for the gameplay to work you need a lot of space to run and do various combos (and throw people, etc), so they had to made the areas large for that, but they didn't try to add any additional detail that wouldn't affect the gameplay.

Oni has a good combat system, truth be told, but the level design is subpar and even the enemy design isn't that good. It tries tho, it's kind of a weirdo version of a fighting scroller (a genre that died a few years before Oni). Bungie never had a knack for good level design. Marathon is nice for the ambience and Halo needs three games to get properly into gear, and half of Halo CE is recycled content. SHOGO has decent robot sections, but the on foot sections are worse than Blood II by far, and that's a feat.

Rethinking about Selaco, I've realized that there are essentially just two decent fights in the entire demo: the warehouse fight and kinda-sorta the boss. The boss barely passes , I understand it's a miniboss but it's incredibly simple, but the warehouse was legit fun, while all the other combat encounters are always 2-3 riflemen plus shotgunners in a corridor, it gets old incredibly fast.

 

[Morenatsu.]

And on Playstation 2, but it's still a Macintosh game made within Macintosh limitations. Hence the simple lighting and sparse environments.

At the time Oni was made Macintosh didn't have any limitation when it comes to graphics, they were basically PCs with a PowerPC CPU instead of an Intel one, at the turn of the century OpenGL was at its peak in terms of both performance and features and Macs used Nvidia-based GPUs which always had the best OpenGL implementation.

It wouldn't be until years later when they started focusing too much on "the thinnest ever" stuff and weird designs that performance would actually start becoming an issue, but that'd be a decade after Oni was made. Even the 2009 Mac Pro could get some very beefy GPUs (and in fact people who wanted high end graphics on a Mac preferred to buy refurbished/used 2009 Mac Pros with high end GeForces - Nvidia kept releasing drivers even after Apple decided to go with AMD).

Being on PlayStation 2 while being in development before the console was released was a more likely reason for the sparse environments than being on Mac (though i'm not sure if that was actually the case - i just think it is more likely than Mac being the issue).

It's something one of the developers said, that their target platform at the time was the iMac G3, which mostly only came with an 8MB ATI Rage 128. And I don't think you can rely on the people who would upgrade to sell your game to the people who wouldn't. The PS2 being involved later on in development doesn't help, but I'm not sure how much of a factor that really was.

TBH i think that "designed by pro architects" was kind at the same level as how Valve's facial animation system was supposedly designed by psychologists - which does have some kernel of truth at a level (AFAIK it is based on some system from psychology which predates the game -and the vast majority of computer games- by decades) but at the end of the day IIRC the system was made by the same guy who did the skeletal animation system in HL1.

It was always talked about as being based on pre-existing research, no one said anything about psychologists literally programming the animation themselves. But the claim of Oni being ‘designed by pro architects’ doesn't make any sense if that isn't literally the case. The reason for that is you need to run chkdsk on ur brian

 

[Bad Sector]

Oni has a good combat system, truth be told, but the level design is subpar and even the enemy design isn't that good. It tries tho, it's kind of a weirdo version of a fighting scroller (a genre that died a few years before Oni).

Oh yeah i agree with that, the levels are essentially a series of big rooms to fight in with some locked doors that you need to unlock and a secret item stashed in a corner here and there but they are done in the simplest way possible.

It's something one of the developers said, that their target platform at the time was the iMac G3, which mostly only came with an 8MB ATI Rage 128. And I don't think you can rely on the people who would upgrade to sell your game to the people who wouldn't.

That'd be for the low end requirements, similarly to how any PC title of the time would need to work more than on the most high end PCs. In fact, out of the box the many iMac G3s had RAM below the game's minimum requirements (which would need an upgrade) and for some the CPU wasn't even fast enough.

But as i wrote, there weren't any Mac-specific limitations, the Macs of the time were pretty much as powerful as the PCs of the time. It wouldn't be any different from a game developer targeting old PC specs so your "Macintosh game made within Macintosh limitations" is wrong. There were no Macintosh limitations aside perhaps from using OpenGL instead of Direct3D but OpenGL was also on PC and as i wrote at the time it was at its peak in terms of both performance and features.

It was always talked about as being based on pre-existing research, no one said anything about psychologists literally programming the animation themselves. But the claim of Oni being ‘designed by pro architects’ doesn't make any sense if that isn't literally the case.

I explicitly remember reading in interviews (that was 2003 at most, before the game was released) that Valve hired psychologists so they get the game's NPC interactivity right. It was something that i also remember being referenced at some point in a YouTube video as a joke. That was years ago though, so unless i go sleuthing to find the source of that (which i'm not feeling like doing as it is pointless), i can't point to anything off the top of my head and a quick Google search has a ton of false positives.

But this is beside the point, my point was that i'd take both of these with a grain of salt since PR -even back in the innocent 90s- tends to overexaggerate things. Being designed by pro architects can mean that they hired some architect to create a few concept art-like pieces for how the buildings would look but the actual design was made by the level designers at Bungie. Or it could mean that one of the level designers also had some architecture knowledge - you may not know it but at the time architecture was sold to level designers as something that was very useful for them to know.

Of course it could also be that they hired an architect to design the levels but i'm pretty much certain that wasn't the case.

 

[toughasnails]

SHOGO has decent robot sections, but the on foot sections are worse than Blood II by far, and that's a feat.

I might actually agree. Blood 2 at least had some more visually or thematically interesting levels compared to Shogo's on foot parts and the latter's weirdo RNG critical hits (combined with p much all enemies being hitscan) made those parts even worse.
With mech sections you had huge amounts of HP so critical hits weren't event that noticeable whereas in the on foot parts you could go from I think 70-80 HP to dead in one hit. And the urban mech levels looked legitimately good unlike the on foot ones.

 

[Morenatsu.]

Oni has a good combat system, truth be told, but the level design is subpar and even the enemy design isn't that good. It tries tho, it's kind of a weirdo version of a fighting scroller (a genre that died a few years before Oni).

Oh yeah i agree with that, the levels are essentially a series of big rooms to fight in with some locked doors that you need to unlock and a secret item stashed in a corner here and there but they are done in the simplest way possible.

It's something one of the developers said, that their target platform at the time was the iMac G3, which mostly only came with an 8MB ATI Rage 128. And I don't think you can rely on the people who would upgrade to sell your game to the people who wouldn't.

That'd be for the low end requirements, similarly to how any PC title of the time would need to work more than on the most high end PCs. In fact, out of the box the many iMac G3s had RAM below the game's minimum requirements (which would need an upgrade) and for some the CPU wasn't even fast enough.

But as i wrote, there weren't any Mac-specific limitations, the Macs of the time were pretty much as powerful as the PCs of the time. It wouldn't be any different from a game developer targeting old PC specs so your "Macintosh game made within Macintosh limitations" is wrong. There were no Macintosh limitations aside perhaps from using OpenGL instead of Direct3D but OpenGL was also on PC and as i wrote at the time it was at its peak in terms of both performance and features.

It was always talked about as being based on pre-existing research, no one said anything about psychologists literally programming the animation themselves. But the claim of Oni being ‘designed by pro architects’ doesn't make any sense if that isn't literally the case.

I explicitly remember reading in interviews (that was 2003 at most, before the game was released) that Valve hired psychologists so they get the game's NPC interactivity right. It was something that i also remember being referenced at some point in a YouTube video as a joke. That was years ago though, so unless i go sleuthing to find the source of that (which i'm not feeling like doing as it is pointless), i can't point to anything off the top of my head and a quick Google search has a ton of false positives.

But this is beside the point, my point was that i'd take both of these with a grain of salt since PR -even back in the innocent 90s- tends to overexaggerate things. Being designed by pro architects can mean that they hired some architect to create a few concept art-like pieces for how the buildings would look but the actual design was made by the level designers at Bungie. Or it could mean that one of the level designers also had some architecture knowledge - you may not know it but at the time architecture was sold to level designers as something that was very useful for them to know.

Of course it could also be that they hired an architect to design the levels but i'm pretty much certain that wasn't the case.

I mean, Valve likes designers with architectural experience, didn't you know. If anyone's to hire psychologists for game design, it's Valve, so if they say it happened, I believe them. What's an architect, anyway? What do they do? Where is the line drawn between level designer with some knowledge and actual architects? If an architect makes a concept, or even a layout, and level designer models it, who made the level? If a map is like a realistic empty boring building, is it level design? If Macintoshes can be upgraded, will they be? Why didn't Bungie make Macintosh Crysis? What about PC-only games that still got their graphics downgraded before release? Everyone could have just upgraded, they didn't need to do that. Macintosh developers obviously wouldn't take advantage of their more standardized platform to make their game run for most people. They didn't make their game for the weakest iMac so they obviously wanted to make it for only the best but muh PS2. It's not like you could only downgrade the PS2 version and not the others or anything. Game developers are proven idiots so let's listen to Bad Sector instead.

 

[Bad Sector]

I mean, Valve likes designers with architectural experience, didn't you know.

Maybe, dunno, what does that have to do with what i wrote though? I don't remember Valve claiming that their levels were designed by pro architects.

If anyone's to hire psychologists for game design, it's Valve, so if they say it happened, I believe them.

Good for you and they probably did later since i found several articles about them doing such a thing - but that was much more recently and not during HL2's development.

What's an architect, anyway?

Why do you jump back to architects? What is the point of that question?

What do they do?

Stuff.

Where is the line drawn between level designer with some knowledge and actual architects?

They are about very different things.

If an architect makes a concept, or even a layout, and level designer models it, who made the level?

Level designers wouldn't model a layout that someone else made, that'd be environment artists (level designers might use modular assets by environment artists though). Level designers are who would make the layout and that layout would have to do with the gameplay, not the architecture in a way that architects would care about - a lot of levels do not make sense architecturally.

If a map is like a realistic empty boring building, is it level design?

Yes, though if it is boring because of how it plays it'd be bad level design. If it is boring because of how it looks then that doesn't have to do with level design but with environment art.

If Macintoshes can be upgraded, will they be?

By themselves? I don't think they can do that.

Why didn't Bungie make Macintosh Crysis?

I'd guess because Crysis was made after Bungie was bought by Microsoft and didn't exist at the time we are hopefully discussing about.

What about PC-only games that still got their graphics downgraded before release?

What about them?

Everyone could have just upgraded, they didn't need to do that. Macintosh developers obviously wouldn't take advantage of their more standardized platform to make their game run for most people.

Are you still referring to Oni here? As i already wrote Macintoshes at the time were pretty much the same as PCs aside from using PowerPC instead of x86 CPUs and the game had a PC version.

They didn't make their game for the weakest iMac so they obviously wanted to make it for only the best

I don't see how one would imply the other. It is like claiming that since a developer who makes PC games doesn't try to support 386 (the weakest 32bit x86 CPU) or -say- Athlon64 (the weakest 64bit x86 CPU), they only make games for a 12th gen i9 / Ryzen 5900X.

Except of course - and i hope you are capable to understand this - system requirements do not work in this extreme way.

but muh PS2.

I realize you are trying to sound stupid with that "muh" here but you are overdoing it because you failed to convey what PS2 has to do with what you were writing so far.

It's not like you could only downgrade the PS2 version and not the others or anything.

PS2 has nothing to do with what i wrote, try to understand what others are writing before writing random pseudo-vague garbage in an attempt to sound smart.

Game developers are proven idiots so let's listen to Bad Sector instead.

Never claimed anything like that.

 

[Morenatsu.]

I ask stupid questions because you make stupid statements.

Level designers wouldn't model a layout that someone else made, that'd be environment artists (level designers might use modular assets by environment artists though). Level designers are who would make the layout and that layout would have to do with the gameplay, not the architecture in a way that architects would care about - a lot of levels do not make sense architecturally.

Looking at MobyGames, Oni's credits list list ‘level modelling’ and ‘designers’, so that's probably the case here, which is entirely believable given how gameplay is, but otherwise that's an assumption that only applies to some games. Looking at 90s shooters, the expectation is that the level designers do all the modelling themselves, because why wouldn't they. Some games don't have those convenient level editors, but the modeller and the designer might still be the same. Because modelling is half or even most of the design, and if you can have one guy do it all himself, that's easier than two guys trying to do it.

What does that have to do with Oni, and what does any of this have to do with Selaco? Your mom lmao

 

[SharkClub]

I played the demo and it's pretty good. I think I mentioned somewhere before about how all these boomer shooters are mixing together in my mind and that I'm getting boomer shooter fatigue, in reference to this game specifically. Allow me to reassess then because Selaco actually plays differently enough that it's kinda like a blend of something like Ion Fury, FEAR and System Shock 1. I tried to put 0451 in a code panel and the game electrocuted me and told me it wasn't an immersive sim though. I also don't mind female protagonists if they aren't goblina bulldykes and have no aversion to cute girls so that's fine by me.

Looking forward to the final product, wishlisted it and will keep an eye on it.

 

[yellowcake]

I played Oni not long after release (and many times since) and remember actualy thinking at that time that level or environment design was great and had to be inspired by real architectural designs. Later I encountered the claim that it was in fact so and was not surprised.

As an example of this architectural thinking - there is a lot of verticality in the game; there are levels that take cue from known architectural concepts like atrium building with open space in the middle that goes vertically through all floor planes, with serpentine stairways around etc. Big open halls with galleries of smaller interiors on the side etc. All in all there's a feeling of construction - not that the interiors are thought out from the inside as one added to another, but rather that an environment was first constructed like an actual building - supporting elements, resting elements (floor planes), and then gameplay path was implemented inside.

I think that it greatly added to the game atmosphere as it takes place in cyberpunk cityscapes & industrial districts, airport etc. that levels feel like actual buildings with a real purpose.

I didn't mind emptiness tbh and it made appreciating "architecture" easier and performance better. The combat system is still next to none IMO.