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

[Tweed]

But if that doesn't do it for you there's always Eradicator:

Spoiler

Spoiler

 

[Tacgnol]

Here you go famalam:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Pursuit_of_Greed

The game was pretty shit, but it had both a superb soundtrack and very unique art.

Brings back memories.

Quite a few parts of the soundtrack got remixed and appeared in the Crusader series as well.

 

[Tweed]

Here you go famalam:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Pursuit_of_Greed

The game was pretty shit, but it had both a superb soundtrack and very unique art.

Brings back memories.

Quite a few parts of the soundtrack got remixed and appeared in the Crusader series as well.

And in Unreal

 

[Morenatsu.]

tfw when you already know all these things

makes you think

i have, liek, skaarj and krall playermodel mods in unreal, lol, im crazzziee XDDDDDD

So anyway back to Selloutco

 

[Tweed]

So anyway back to Selloutco

Don't complain if you're just gonna play shit anyhow. I tried to help.

EDIT: Not that Guncaster is really all that good. If you've played one Pillowbiter mod, you've played them all.

 

[Morenatsu.]

So anyway back to Selloutco

Don't complain if you're just gonna play shit anyhow. I tried to help.

EDIT: Not that Guncaster is really all that good. If you've played one Pillowbiter mod, you've played them all.

No, I meant back to complaining instead of playing, duh.

 

[Momock]

Interesting. I don't know shit about scripting so I can't really get what the problems are, but I did wonder if the weird slide was the result of some kind of technical limitation or something. The speed and power feel fine, even fun if you manage to slide right into someone and send them flying, but the distance covered with a single slide is insane.

Don't talk the devs into nerfing it, ffs! Make them build all the game around it instead! It feels amazing to slide-jump like a first person Richter Belmont.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Only highly questionable thing on dev's twitter is he is defending the new Monkey Island art style. That does make me suspicious of the dev's taste at the very least.

Not like you couldn't see that in this game.

Selaco is one of the better looking boomer shooters, with graphics that aren't made shit or wierd ('cause lol retro!) on purpose (at least for the most part, hard to tell how much the GZDoom engine is a limiting factor in what they can do) which is a big pet peeve for me (i can overlook things like Dusk which were made by one dude but generally if your game looks shittier than something from 1996 there's a problem there, to say the least). So it is all the more regretful that they went with this pseudo-animu stuff, but so far it's only human faces that look animu the rest is normal. Reminds me Shogo (which also did animu horribly).

 

[Dayyālu]

What the fuck was even this thread about in the last few pages

Has the Codex IQ taken several hits while I wasn't looking, I'm starting to miss when everything was the fault of the JOOS or something

(i can overlook things like Dusk which were made by one dude

Dusk has shitty art-style on purpose and the developer defended it ferociously comparing it to Quake. I'm still puzzled why he thought that the models for Quake, that are top-tier in detail and theme for their age can be compared to the .... things you find in Dusk. Too many people think that retro art can cover for poor art direction and design: Selaco isn't bad looking, but I still find the enemy design to be mediocre and the clutter excessive. Less is more.

 

[Lemming42]

The maps do have a lot of visual clutter but I like the novelty of seeing a heavily detailed environment rendered using older tech, same for Ion Fury. The environments are attractive and it's not like the clutter makes it tough to see what's interactive or anything like that - in the demo, at least, I thought the way forward was pretty clearly signposted at all times, maybe barring one time where there's a vent hidden in the corner of the room or whatever.

Selaco definitely feels closer to the "let's make a good shooter with some modern sensibilities that just happens to run on an old engine" ethos than the "let's make everything look like fucking shit and respond to all criticism by insisting it's retro so it's allowed to look terrible" ethos.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Dusk has shitty art-style on purpose and the developer defended it ferociously comparing it to Quake. I'm still puzzled why he thought that the models for Quake, that are top-tier in detail and theme for their age can be compared to the .... things you find in Dusk.

Maybe it was just copium. People told him his models were shit to his face and he started reeeeing.

I think that's the best he could do and was too arrogant to admit it. I hope in his next game he hires some actual graphic artists.

 

[Jenkem]

jeb's at it again...

also really tired of everyone focusing on this game with the "muh FEAR-like!!!" I played the demo, it's good and has elements of Fear, for sure, but not really.

Try Trepang 2 or Severed Steel if you want games that are ACTUALLY similar to FEAR.

 

[Hobo Elf]

Tried the demo and it was a lot less fun than I expected. The enemies bleed too much with the background and the rifle was the only gun that felt good and fun to use. The pistol was trash and the shotgun was just painfully clunky and slow. I like all the interactivity with the world but as a shooter it's pretty subpar so far. I'm impressed with what they were able to achieve with the GZDoom engine but they really need to fix the gameplay stuff because I haven't played a shooter in a long time that felt this stiff while simultaneously trying to be fast paced and dynamic.

 

[aweigh]

jeb's at it again...

also really tired of everyone focusing on this game with the "muh FEAR-like!!!" I played the demo, it's good and has elements of Fear, for sure, but not really.

Try Trepang 2 or Severed Steel if you want games that are ACTUALLY similar to FEAR.

I just played the Trepang2 demo and I was... severely underwhelmed. On the plus side: it looks and plays almost exactly like FEAR. On the downside: it was incredbly boring.
But it was just a demo level, we'll see.

 

[Lithium Flower]

Can we stop and get Durandal?

Mom: We have Durandal at home.

Durandal at home: it's me, motherfuckers, and I'm too lazy to make this part an image

Of the hundred thousand WIP boomer shooters out there, Selaco always seemed most promising to me. I generally dislike the blend of character action and FPS as popularized by Doom 2016, and although I like old school shooters just fine, my favorite FPS sub-genre is what I might call "high octane tactical shit or like whatever." My long explanation is that the concept combines fast-paced, high-lethality gameplay which incentivizes movement and aggression (the high octane part) while emphasizing situational awareness and setting a deliberate, dynamic rhythm to firefights (the tactical part.) The short version is that I may have autism.

To give you some idea, Insurgency: Sandstorm is my multiplayer poison of choice, but in terms of single-player games, FEAR and Brutal Doom with certain other mods and gameplay settings came pretty close to scratching that itch.

I've beat the demo twice, once on Captain/Hardcore and second time on Admiral/Hardcore (combined playtime of 5 and a half hours.) The first playthrough underwhelmed me, but I am happy to say that the second ended up hitting my fast-paced semi-tactical G-spot, although not without some awkward moves and sore spots. Even if the full game is just an expanded version of the demo it will definitely be in my top 3 retro renaissance FPS, which says a lot considering how fucking many of them there are.

Things I Liked

The combat rhythm is very solid. Similar to FEAR the enemy AI is simple, reasonably competent, and behaves in a way that leads to decent variation between firefights - as far as I can tell the enemy will usually stand still to attack in bursts, then quickly relocate, seemingly prioritizing moving closer to the player and moving near cover which naturally leads to flanking. When cornered, enemies will strafe and fire aggressively, trying to get distance and in some cases will try to dive out of the way of fire or dash into cover. The semi-predictable nature of enemy attacks combined with their semi-unpredictable movements in environments with plentiful cover usually leads to an exciting cat-and-mouse dynamic. In one moment, such as when you need to reload or the enemy unloads at your position, you may be driven to quickly dodge aside or hunker down behind cover. In the next, perhaps as the sound of gunfire shifts into that of footsteps, you should relocate and attack aggressively to seize momentum from the enemy. And successfully combining the two approaches in a high risk/reward maneuver creates satisfying moments such as sliding under a hail of bullets to take out your attacker and his entire fire-team in a single blaze of automatic glory.

The environmental effects and interactivity seem to have been deliberately implemented to reinforce this gameplay flow rather than being gimmicks - on higher Smoke Quality settings the amount of dust and debris kicked up from gunshot impacts ends up locally reducing visibility to the point of compromising a position's usefulness, while unexpected advantages in combat may be secured by kicking over furniture to use as cover, activating emergency shutters to create a chokepoint, or even by killing the lights (besides aiding target acquisition by exploiting your enemies' glowing visors, they also appear to have a harder time hitting you in the dark.) The end result is that you are at all times encouraged to alternate or combine violence with movement while maintaining a high level of situational awareness.

Your arsenal, or at least the three guns present in the demo, seem well designed and fill a specific niche:

-The Assault Rifle is a workhorse weapon with low damage and good accuracy. It feels very safe to use due to its steady rate of fire and plentiful ammo, and incentivizes spraying down enemies with bursts of concentrated, debilitating fire while shortening time to kill by aiming for their heads.

-The Pistol is a hi-caliber handcannon with high damage and recoil, and a 3 round burst mode instead of the ability to aim. Its ammo, both in magazine and in supply, is more limited than that of the assault rifle. All that combines means it is most appropriately used as a proper sidearm - lacking in a prolonged firefight, but ideal when you need to quickly deliver a burst of damage, for instance to secure a kill immediately after your primary weapon runs dry.

-The Shotgun is your typical pump-action affair, low rate of fire, high damage, with a much tighter spread compared to most video game shotguns while still performing relatively inconsistently at medium-long ranges. A natural opposite to the Assault Rifle, more suited for CQC and taking out single targets when the AR is better at tackling groups of enemies in the medium range. Feels very good to use, IMO.

-Grenades are present, can be quickly thrown via a dedicated button and seem to have a good blast radius, though I have not really used them enough to note anything particularly interesting.

(Sounds are a different story and subject to a manic pixie dream freakout later in the post.)

It should be noted that all of the above I did not fully appreciate until my second playthrough on Admiral/Hardcore. Captain, while pretty lethal, felt forgiving enough that I could at times just run and gun instead of following the game's rhythm and the enemies were too weak and slow for me to notice much of the variability in their behavior.

Hardcore difficulty modifier itself was an unexpected but very welcome feature. It disables quicksaves/checkpoints in exchange for allowing you to save for a fee at wending machines, removes health regeneration, and makes you waste unspent ammo in the magazine discarded when you reload. Some may be ribbed by these controversial changes, but I think that in actuality it is these changes that are "ribbed," so to speak, for the ""pleasure,"" one might say, of my """asshole.""" The game is rich with secrets and interactivity so this mode heavily pushes you to explore and scavenge around to offset your mistakes and spent resources - with the promise of upgrades and several different gameplay-affecting collectibles/currencies I honestly got some System Shock vibes from my experience with the game.

Overall I'm pretty fucking excited by all the different systems and gameplay modifiers promised - looks like the type of game I would spend a lot of time replaying. And the nice thing about the choice to use GZDoom as an engine is that it is very easy to tinker with and mod.

Issues and Suggestions (in no particular order and without consideration for how plausible these things are to change/implement at this point in development. There were more I guess or I think but I wrote a lot of things and some of which I don't remember writing)

* Is there no way to prevent sprites from clipping through each other Nexxtic ? I love that the game has gore and dismemberment approaching BD, and cool interactions between enemy sprites and walls for instance, but enemy corpses often look awful, some due to being drawn from a strange perspective, but all due to clipping under their own blood pool half the time. GZDoom has a setting to prevent sprites from clipping through each other so I wonder if it turned out to be somehow incompatible with the way the game layers the rest of its sophisticated effects. Oh and this is a pet issue but let me disable the screen border you get when you get your armor, it's important and there will be a schizo-rant about visibility later so you know how passionately I feel about this issue.

*Some pieces of low cover, like the beds in the room where you get the assault rifle, produce a bizarre purple, glowing mist that is difficult to see through and I cannot imagine was intentional.

*Hardcore mode's pacing could be better. You get a free save nearly at the very start of the first level before you get a suit which unlocks some of your abilities which happens to also be locked behind a very annoying tutorial door. You don't get an access to a wending machine to purchase a save until about a half-way through the second level, and if you did not do any secret hunting then you probably won't have the credits to actually buy it. So I would give the player another free save either at the point of getting the aforementioned suit, or upon entering the second level - as it stands the first level was by far the most annoying difficulty hump for me due to the sheer amount of encounters I had to get through to secure a save, when I really wished that it were the more interesting and challenging sequences in the latter half of the demo that stood out to me more.

*Hardcore mode description promises that saves cost 600 credits, but in-game they cost 800.

*While I like the unspent ammo wasting mechanic as-is (I really find the fact that most FPS encourage you to spam the R key after every fired shot to be pretty degenerate, to borrow Ash's parlance,) it would be cool to implement a much longer alternate reload that would retain the magazine. Not necessarily the way it is implemented in Insurgency Sandstorm, or even requiring extra spritework, but perhaps a button to "load magazines" or something that would need to be held down for like 10 seconds, remove the weapon from the screen, and play some ASMR weapon handling sound effects, resulting in every weapon's magazine being refilled from your surplus without wasting rounds.
This would murder quite a few avian lifeforms with the toss of a single rock:
-allows players to top up their arsenal between firefights without messing with combat balance,
-encourages people to juggle weapons more rather than reloading one repeatedly
-saves time overall rather than having to cycle and reload each weapon in your arsenal
-cuts down on situations where I might accidentally waste a ton of ammo by ex. throwing away a 29 bullet mag for a 15 bullet reload because I am a retarded flesh puppet controlled by parasitic reflex

*The Juggernaut bossfight. Retreating to the small pillar above the staircase leading up from the arena allows you to simply treat him like a much more boring version of a regular enemy, trading volleys until you grind him down. He is unable to chase you up the stairs and will instead wedge himself in the little courtyard where he won't be able to shoot you half the time, while you have perfect access to his head. Boss felt too big for the arena - one fix would be just to change the arena substantially (thankfully you have an excuse to do that since it's a more destroyed version of a previously visited area in the first place.) Or make the boss smaller and give him a more dynamic and mobile set of abilities better suited to the arena.

*I dislike the way guns sound in like 90% of games and Selaco, while not being offensive to my ears, could better suit my particular tastes:

-Your own gunfire is mixed pretty low in relation to every other sound in the game, which is distracting considering how much punchier the enemy weapons sound to my ears. This could have been another opportunity to emphasize the game's cat and mouse flow, forcing breaks in your fire so that you could better listen for enemy movement, but instead your weapons sound anemic, puny, and indistinct just like in almost every other game.

-Assault Rifle is shrill, all high-end, like the gunfire is almost as sibilant as the sound of spent cases falling. But worse, my impression is that the sound effect isn't that of each individual shot but instead a sequence of gunfire that is simply cut short when you only fire a few rounds. The result sounds okay if you are mag-dumping, which I guess is how you are supposed to use the AR, but sounds horrible when you fire in short bursts and especially so when firing single shots - the gun sounds like it fires about 50% faster than it actually does and the result is a cacophonic banshee wail in which I can barely distinguish what is supposed to be the gun shot from the action cycling. I mean I could be wrong but I used my proficiency with computers and the highly sophisticated program known as 7zip to decrypt and hack into the black box program software source file code 'Selaco.ipk3' and these are my conclusions based on the sound files I dug up and how they sound to me in game. If I am correct then I assume this was a compromise to make prolonged fire sound better and less monotonous at the cost of making shorter bursts sound unnatural, but it is a compromise that I TAKE GRAVE OFFENSE TO, SIR OR MADAM READER.

-Handgun is muffled, all low-end, like the gunfire is almost as much of a thump a- wait a fucking second, I get what you are doing now. You wanted more treble on the low-damage, high firerate guns to make them sound like high-velocity bullethoses while making the slow, hi-power guns all bassy and shit to make them sound punchy. I appreciate if this was the design but what you have achieved is an assault rifle that sounds like a stapler being assaulted with a jackhammer and a pistol that sounds like being awoken by the sound of drunk roommate bumping into a wall... in the basement of another building - that has collapsed and is underwater - and at least three blocks away.

-Shotgun sounds integrally suppressed, I mean, is it fucking supposed to be and if so, why? It sounds wrong, like you are playing back the sounds of a vacuum cleaner being raped in reverse.

you have the entire sound spectrum to abuse to my pleasure and yet you choose to do whatever this is. why?

*I agree with Hobo Elf et al that there are issues with distinguishing enemy sprites from the environment on default settings. Much like stepping up to a higher difficulty, tweaking settings really helped me appreciate the game more, so I will list some things that I personally did, starting with stuff I'm confident will help most people and putting more aesthetic/subjective/schizoid preferences at the bottom of the list.
-The most brute force fix is to enable Bright Skins which should fix the issue of enemy visibility entirely. Issue is that it almost feels like cheating, since it makes fighting in the dark strictly superior than fighting in the light due to how easily the enemies stand out, and it looks jarring besides, so instead I use other means.
-Reducing Bloom to 0.30 and Gamma Correction to 0.90 is my solution of choice. Contrast is heightened, which makes the glowing bits of enemies (which, for riflemen, are their visor ie exactly where you want to aim) stand out from the environment and your flashlight more effective, while also reigning in the bloom somewhat which makes the image cleaner.
-Disabled film grain, set HUD scale to 0.8
-This stuff is super subjective but I also set the FoV to 120 (with strafe tilting OF COURSE #quakecore #quake4lyfe #quakeprideworldwide #ineverevenplayedquake) disabled the crosshair, enabled ADS, and uh you know I think that's it yeah.

In general my settings are informed by the fact that I much prefer actually being able to like use my eyeballs to obtain visual information and dumb stuff such as that rather than hoping that the chaotic cluster of icons covering half the screen helps me more than it prevents me from seeing shit. That being said I'm pretty sensitive to this stuff and Selaco's HUD isn't super intrusive on default settings especially when compared to Prodeus or whatever else fell off the nuDoom "I'm 90 years old but I sure want to squeeze my old ass and cock and balls into these here skinny jeans of my youth, except instead of maneuvering my geriatric body into age-inappropriate attire I am inducing psychotic rants in Lithium Flower by presenting my 'uninspired new wave abstract retro old school boomer-zoomer hyper-realistic labyrinthine joy division character-action arena shooter ala Project Brutality meets AIDS' through the vision of a half-blind cyclops in a perpetual epilepsy fit whose head is stuck in an alienware gaming rig with extra aftermarket LEDs because he thought it was a fucking helmet" groupie-reject bandwagon. Seriously, I know most people like this incoherent shit, and I'm sure it's for the same dumb lizard brain reasons as my affinity towards motion blur and strafe tilting and whatever else, but why? Immersion, realism? You fucking morons, you think in year 3022 a space marine will put on a helmet that will kill 90% of his vision? What's immersive is setting your FOV to eleventy-two hundred and enabling a tastefully low chromatic abberation setting to simulate feeds from like a bazillion cameras on the outside of a plausible sci-fi helmet being fed directly into your fucking optic nerves you illiterate dumbasses who dropped out of fourth grade and never read a science book in your life I mean neither have I but fuck you I bet you especially didn't and I hope that you fry your eyeballs playing your precious Prodeus or Migraine Aura Simulator or I Love Not Being Able to See Shit 2: Myopic Boogaloo until your vision gets fucking stuck like that and that's all you see every day until the nice nurse tells you "alright Lithium-dear, it's time for your shot" and you can't fight her off this one ti

 

[Ol' Willy]

*While I like the unspent ammo wasting mechanic as-is (I really find the fact that most FPS encourage you to spam the R key after every fired shot to be pretty degenerate, to borrow @Ash's parlance,) it would be cool to implement a much longer alternate reload that would retain the magazine. Not necessarily the way it is implemented in Insurgency Sandstorm, or even requiring extra spritework, but perhaps a button to "load magazines" or something that would need to be held down for like 10 seconds, remove the weapon from the screen, and play some ASMR weapon handling sound effects, resulting in every weapon's magazine being refilled from your surplus without wasting rounds.

Like in Hideous Destructor.

With mag manager and manual reload

 

[Morenatsu.]

Actually spam R to reload is based.

 

[Morenatsu.]

Ok so I took a break from shitpoasting and actually played this thing. My gawd, it's horribel, moddersgonnamod + nudoom + that one clusterfuck ui parody picture but actually. Gave me brainfog. no idea what thae fuq wass goin on

 

[Mary Sue Leigh]

On page 1 the steam link says "Full Release in 2255"
Not sure if that's a bug or just incredibly realistic projections for once?

 

[geno]

The first demo didn't click on me but I'm willing to give it a new shot, seems like they've been overhauling their game.

 

[Fedora Master]

Ah yes. What every boomer shooter needs: Gamepad support.

 

[gerey]

They forget to mention the other important features:

✓ Body type B protagonist
✓ Pronoun selection
✓ Feminine penis

 

[Melcar]

Oh hey, this is still on.

 

[Curratum]

Polishing a turd never works...

 

[JDR13]

The first demo didn't click on me but I'm willing to give it a new shot, seems like they've been overhauling their game.

Do we still have to play as the dude with a vagina?