# Overview

A PC-98 FPS inspired by Crime Crackers with Ikaruga mechanics. What could possibly go wrong?

As always, the Ludum Dare entry page is here

# Design

Pre-mouse FPS controls have NOT aged well. You can see it in the sample clip, there’s a lot of tank-like movement here. Doom avoided this with its weapon choices, but we used ikaruga style bullet hell weapons, so there’s little incentive to be precise.

We chose to go with Ikaruga style “positive and negative” enemies. Wrong polarities still take damage, just a lot less. Bullet absorb is still there, but it doesn’t store anywhere. We added an ammo system for the special weapons but… I ran out of time to implement ammo so it’s just confusing why your weapon starts to suck suddenly.

Level design is procgen, same with enemy placement. For a jam this is understandable, but if I ever do an FPS again, I’ll make sure to build a proper level editor. The procgen took about as much time as an editor would have anyway, if not more after you factor in all the debugging and fixing edge cases… and the resulting gameplay is really boring and samey. We had to add a map so you wouldn’t get lost as easily, but you can still get mega lost.

Later levels have some progression in enemy sets and world building, so there’s some reward for progressing, even if there’s not a ton of intent in the levels themselves.

# Tech

Before anyone asks, no, I didn’t write a raycasting engine here. Heck I didn’t even write a model importer. The renderer is cobbled together in the worst way possible, but computers are fast so it’s fine!

There’s an unsolved bug where after a certain amount of time, billboards may stop rendering, making the game pretty heckin hard. Oops… No idea what causes this and I was too tired after the jam to dig deeper. Then I forgot. Maybe some day I’ll revisit it.

Lighting is a simple stepped distance shader. It does the job here.

# Play

The latest version can be found here