Disputed Space - FPS Action Game

Latest Video of Disputed Space:

Original Post from May 27, 2015:
I am currently working on a game called Disputed Space. It is a first person shooter set in space. It uses a game controller to play. The game allows six degrees of freedom similar to Descent. The player can aim up/down/left/right, strafe up/down/left/right, fly forward and backwards, and roll clockwise and counterclockwise.

The core goal with this game is to provide an awesome dogfighting experience. The AI units can move with six degrees of freedom, just like the player. The AI units will try to spherical strafe their targets, just like a skilled human player would do. I implemented factions (teams), and AI units will try to work with teammates and attack enemies.

I also implemented ship classes, and AI units use these ship classes to decide which targets to go after first. For example, a heavy turret will focus on big, slow moving ships first and small, fast moving fighters last. Small turrets will focus on small fighters before large ships.

I have been developing Disputed Space since the summer of 2014. I figured I should post something in the work in progress section at this point.

Here are some screenshots and videos of Disputed Space.

 

Nice work!

Reminds me of one of my games just with better graphics, AI, capital ships, expolsions...

Keep it up

 

Looks great. Very nice job so far.

 

Videos

 

Here is a video I did today with a larger battle.

 

Here is a video with a bunch of small fighters engaging in an intense dogfight without any capital ships for support:

 

There just isn't enough bullets flying around in all directions all over the place!

This looks wildly elegant. Nice work.

 

Dude, your game looks awesome.

I don't play these kinds of games, but those screenshots just look exciting.

 

Really cool looking, I think the gameplay looks fun and engaging

 

Thank you so much for all of the kind words.

 

Hey man.

While the fights look really epic with all those projectiles and explosions all over the place, they also look extremely chaotic. Chaos isn't always a bad thing, but here I just can't imagine how winning would be anything but sheer luck rather than skillful play.

I am wondering if there is a deeper mechanic counteracting this problem that isn't entirely obvious from your videos, but to me it seems like you are just picking a target, shooting at it until it explodes and then moving on to the next while hoping that you don't get shot in the meantime.

In other frantic shooters with many projectiles on screen like doom 2 there is at least some cover and only 2 axis from which you can get shot from. But here you are totally surrounded by death.

I'd be interested to hear your stance on this.

Apart from that is looks super impressive and it conveys a great sense of scale. I also like how colorful the skyboxes are. Makes it almost look a painting

Anyway, I'll definitely keep an eye on this, good luck!

 

Thank you for your kind words and for your excellent question regarding gameplay mechanics.

One of my all time favorite games was Descent (and Descent 2). What I am trying to do with Disputed Space is create an intense dogfight that feels like Descent felt when playing multiplayer, but in a space setting instead of inside a mine. With Descent, a large part of the intensity was derived from the confined space within a mine. You had to maneuver within the mine while dogfighting. With Disputed Space, I am trying to use the massive amount of laser blasting as a way of creating some of that movement restriction without the mines. The jury is still out on whether or not I can completely accomplish that, but that is what I am going for.

During gameplay, it does not feel like pure chaos or random chaos. It feels like a huge battle is being waged and your little fighter ship is in the middle of that huge battle. There is a huge element of skill involved with avoiding the lasers flying around. There is still a chance to randomly get hit by some of the many lasers flying around, but skill plays a vastly larger role than luck in Disputed Space. I have been play testing it with a variety of people of various skills and ages. Guys who used to play Descent can fly around avoiding nearly all of the lasers. People have played FPS games but who never played Descent need several minutes to get used to the idea of strafing in any direction while simultaneously aiming in any other direction. People who have never played any FPS style game are pretty much toast. Disputed Space will require a comfortable amount of FPS gaming skills in order to enjoy.

The analogy with Doom 2 make sense. I am very familiar with Doom 2. I played quite a bit of Doom and Doom 2 back in the day, and I designed some levels for Doom and Doom 2. In Doom 2, all tactics were obviously 2 axis, since you could not be attacked from above or below. I had several levels I made where the level contained only CyberDemons (large enemy with rocket launchers for hands), since I loved strafing to avoid getting hit while circling around huge enemies. It was a blast. With Disputed Space, those attacks come from any direction, so it can be even more exciting avoiding enemy fire during a large battle.

I do realize that not everybody will want that much of a challenge, especially while they are initially learning the gameplay. One thing about Disputed Space that is quite a bit different than Doom 2 is the fact you have teams of AI units rather than just a single soldier combating massive hordes of demons alone. For level design in Disputed Space, I am currently setting up the team balance to strongly favor the player's faction during early levels. This will let the player be part of a huge battle right away, but it dramatically stacks the odds in the player's favor while the player is getting used to the gameplay mechanics. As the levels progress, the odds will shift to favor the enemy, so the level of challenge will increase. Each level should feel like an epic dogfight for the player. At least that is my theory.

One thing I am currently trying to decide is whether or not I want to have a respawn mechanic in the game. Normally, respawning is only done in multiplayer games. In single player Disputed Space, I am considering having a friendly carrier ship that you could respawn from if/when your small fighter drone gets destroyed. You could keep respawning until that your team's carrier ship was destroyed.

 

In this video today, I intentionally loaded the scene with so much action that my frame rate dropped a little, so I could find some spots to do additional performance tweaking.

 

I have been working more on the dogfighting code today. Previously, I was using the Rigidbody's velocity vector to compute the target leading. However, that always felt slightly behind, so I implemented a new class I called MovementBody. My new MovementBody class handles all of the ship movements, and enemy ships can get a ship's velocity vector directly from my MovementBody class instead of from the Rigidbody. That massively improved the target leading aiming AI in the fighter ships.

I am strafing like wild in the video to try to avoid enemy fire. I actually had to increase the randomness in the targeting code, because the AI units almost couldn't miss at all otherwise.

Previously, the lag or jittery nature of the Rigidbody class was causing the AI units to miss some of the time even without any randomness fed into the target leading code. I am actually surprised by how much the Rigidbody was holding the targeting code back before.

 

I spawned hundreds of enemy fighters and let them attack a single battleship in this video to see what would happen to the frame rate.

 

I rewrote all of my projectile scripts to use object pooling, so I could get a better frame rate during large battles. I also changed the visuals for the projectiles. Here is my latest demo video that shows both improvements:

 

Testing nuclear torpedoes against an enemy carrier ship.

 

I've been working on improving the frame rate during dogfights. On a solid gaming rig with v-sync disabled, the game runs hundreds of frames per second now. Dog fighting is much smoother now. It is really getting fun.

I have a frame rate counter in the upper left corner of the screen. Watch the video full screen on 1080p60 and you can see the fps counter.

 

Here is the latest video. I implemented a custom KungFuCircle layer in the fighter AI code to limit how many fighters can simultaneously attack the same fighter.

 

I have posted Disputed Space on Steam Greenlight. Please vote for it. Thanks!

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=536741747

 

Here is the latest video.

 

I also placed Disputed Space on IndieDB.

 

This looks really cool! Never seen an FPS game based around space battles; reminds me of the Star Wars Battlefront 2 Space Battles, if you've ever played that. good work!

 

Thanks for the kind words.

 

Disputed Space has been Greenlit on Steam.