|
 Most recent trailer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4T_gY1er5I Diabotical is a PC FPS game that is of the Quake/Unreal variety. Meaning there are no gimmick classes, you rely on powerups and upgrades littered across the map, and you more or less die in one shot. The game is very much a spiritual successor to Quake and is being developed by indie game developers, The GD Studio. It held a successful Kickstarter that funded the final portion of development. The beta is due to start sometime before the end of the year but that's just an estimate.  Gameplay/Dev Update - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4T_gY1er5I Who are The GD Studio? Basically it's the company former Quake pro and Twitch/esport personality James "2GD" Harding made to do whatever it was he felt like doing. A few years ago it was a pretty popular esport event/news show but now it's a video game company witha bunch of contractors, modders, and freelancers. It's pretty much a rag tag team of developers based out of Sweden with some guys having worked on games across a bunch of varieties. A fair number of the staff have also been involved in esports at different levels from developers to players, which helps since this game is basically catering to that subset of degenerate humans. Diaboticaly has been in development for a few years but fulltime development didn't start until September 2015, with the recent Kickstarter meant to help them finalize the last year of development for a Summer 2017 launch. So it's just Quake but a different skin? Sort of. It's a "Quake clone" in that it's a faster pace shooter than what most people have released over the years. This means bunny hopping, strafe jumping, rocket jumping, projectile based weapons, etc. etc. They've mentioned they'll be throwing in some other game modes outside of the standard stuff as stretch goals which you can read below. They're also claiming that the game has some unique combination of controls to make stuff easier for new players to the genre but won't make it so skill based movement isn't a thing either. Features In no particular order here are a list of features the game is sporting.
They also have the following two modes as stretch goals in addition to the above: Co-Op Race (met) - An obstacle race against another team of players. Co-Op Survival (met) - Co-Op Horde mode against AI enemies. How much does it cost? At the moment they haven't set a price point but are saying they're aiming for a $10 to $15 range, with microtransactions for cosmetic items to be thrown in. Dropping ~$9 USD during the Kickstarter gets you the game, beta access, and the obligatory "I backed this game" icon every Kickstarter requires. Speaking of cosmetics here's basically some rough designs for the varying looks of your robot warrior of death.  According to the devs the customization is going to be earned via playing or can be bought directly via microtransactions. Tell me about map making http://i.imgur.com/9pE54r2.mp4 It's essentially your standard map editor from what it looks like. Multiple people can work on a map at the same time as well which is pretty cool and can help speed things up. Some additional features are that it comes integrated into the game and can be directly accessed via the main menu. The map making editor will be available during the beta phase meaning you can probably just use that if you hate the pre-made maps the game comes with by default. I have a really cool idea about this game... If you can stand talking to the people who hang out there, The GD Studio set up a discord channel for you to chit chat, give feedback and basically hang out and talk about the game in along with other stuff. The lobby for the Discord will give you the info on how to submit features or feedback you may want to bug the devs about. http://chat.diabotical.com. Also since this is a game basically being built up with a bunch of community support, they're even looking for people to do Voice-Overs of all things or help with art textures etc. but they have no real list of "needs" just a "hey make something and shoot it to us and we'll see if we like it" sort of deal. I have a Mac/Linux and want to play, what about me? From what The GD Studio has stated they can't devote resources to making a version of the game work on those OS' but since they're supportive of open modding of the game you might see someone make a version for either of those. Dev Videos Update #1 VOD - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4T_gY1er5I Things shown/talked about :
Update #2 VOD - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcdBAWznXQ8 Things shown off
Mekchu fucked around with this message at 10:35 on Sep 1, 2016 |
#
?
Aug 16, 2016 07:27
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 26, 2024 16:56 |
|
|
Media Stuff http://i.imgur.com/NlbAIpE.gifv http://i.imgur.com/DHsTf7a.gifv             
Mekchu fucked around with this message at 10:40 on Aug 29, 2016 |
|
#
?
Aug 16, 2016 07:44
|
|
|
will this be on steam considering Gaben himself called 2GD an rear end and stated he wont be working with him anymore
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2016 04:43
|
|
|
Yep, according to the Kickstarter all signs point to it being on Steam despite the Shanghai Incident. Gaben probably meant Valve ran Dota 2 events.
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2016 05:48
|
|
|
Man game looks fun, I was super disappointed when it was just a kickstarter.
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2016 06:27
|
|
|
I updated the OP to more clearly state that its in a Kickstarter at the moment. They said that once the map making tool is done sometime in the next two months they'll be able to launch the beta since they want people to be able to make maps during that round of testing etc.
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2016 06:51
|
|
|
good name change
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2016 09:03
|
|
|
Eurogamer did an article with 2GD mostly on him, but it talks about the game a bit - http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-08-17-meet-the-man-gabe-newell-called-an-rear end-on-reddit Edit - Nothing really major revealed/discussed though. Mekchu fucked around with this message at 22:24 on Aug 17, 2016 |
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2016 21:49
|
|
|
There's a new update on 2GDs channel showing off a few new things since the Kickstarter is a few days from ending. VOD - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcdBAWznXQ8 Things shown off
Mekchu fucked around with this message at 22:22 on Aug 29, 2016 |
|
#
?
Aug 29, 2016 01:00
|
|
|
An AMA thread on Reddit by the devs has gone up. I'll copy/past game specific questions and answers. https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/50b64r/iama_ceo_founder_of_the_gd_studio_lead_designer/ why do you think quake successors like Reflex failed, and what will you do to stop diobotical failing ? Most arena fps games that have been released are still the same game you've played in the past just in a new engine. So even though we are hopefully doing a successor to Quake. It's not a Quake clone. We're always working towards improving the game play and supporting features. But its tough. Lets see how it turns out I should probably give some more info. But when you sit down to do this kind of stuff. Try figure out some clear goals of where you want your product to win, because you cannot do everything. Then know that polish and visual/audio feedback are huge and will take a lot of time. Blizzard games are well designed sure. But more so they are polished and just give you with a very satisfying feeling on a lot of the games interactions. Does that make sense? yeah I'm def a game developer now because I've learnt to talk a lot of poo poo! nailed it! so a year from now, after the game has hopefully launched. What would need to happen for you to consider the game a success? The Dream is... We launched a stable and great product with a player base of more than 17 players. Have the resources to support it over the next 5 years. Then continue to make more multiplayer games. Additionaly start doing content again at The GD Studio for other developers esport titles. But for the game itself. A healthy player base. Various tournaments per year. I hope we can offer something substantial to the esport eco system. Success is hard to measure. For msyelf, it's making a difference... and lots n lots of money. I mean difference! That whole sentence was a big typo. drat you keyboard! What will be the focus game mode? Can we expect Diabotical to go a more team based route like CS:GO and Overwatch, or will you stay focused on duel in the same way as Quake Live has been for the last years? We are looking at Duel & 1 Team mode to be the main 2 competitive modes. The reason being, Duel will always have a place as a fantastic esport game mode. And we are actively working on improving the duel experience from Quakes in terms of spectator and player experience. But we are very aware that not a lot of gamers enjoy dueling. It can be very stressful. Well these days, not a lot of gamers enjoy TDM or even CTF. So we are working on a new game mode that hopefully more gamers can enjoy, while we still offer the classic game modes as part of Diabotical. But the goal of the new team mode is that players can contribute to a win by not only getting a high frag count but also with more strategical play. (because lets be honest, TDM was yes very strategical yes, but sometimes strategy got thrown out the window once Fox got a railgun and Toxic got an LG) Me and my friends have been a bit skeptical of Diabotical's potential success in the long run considering the shift from single-player focused eSports (eg Quake and Starcraft) to the mainstream being entirely team-based games (eg LoL, CS and potentially Overwatch if Blizzard can nurture it enough), do you think there's still a place for the single-player skill-based arena shooters? Do you have any specific marketing plans that you can talk about to help get the game off the ground? How did you get Andy to agree to have 9000 slots in your Kickstarter and how did he take the news that not a single one had been purchased? I am also skeptical of the games success  Feel better? No? oh... well... we work a lot with the community and are very integrated in other esport games communities. So we probably share a lot of the same opinions on whats working and whats not across various titles you play.Diabotical isn't just a 1v1 duel game, there are various team modes. We've also hit the stretch goal to add co-op survival. Which I think will be a great medium to teach gamers the games mechanics in a safe, fun place before they get their asses handed to them in ranked play. I hope that even if you only enjoy the co-op game mode, you'll be able to make a connection with the game and can appreciate the worlds best players going at it in a 1v1 tournament live at DreamHack or PGL. Marketing wise, We're good in esports (tbh, most big game devs only look at esports as marketing these days anyways...Not that I agree with them. I think it should be a deeper more integrated part of the games experience). We already have budget to do tournaments from various partners. Since my history has been mainly esports and only 4 years in game development across two titles. It was almost impossible to raise the money we wanted for development (Unless we took a really lovely deal). but as soon as I spoke about esport tournaments once the game was released. Everyone was much more interested to support the product post launch. Andy studied game development before moving into esports and has supported the company in our weird path. Even helped financially at times. Since the project has been so far about 95% self funded, he's seen how everything has gone down from the start of development till now. Plus he's a very legit dude, he always gives us his all. He goes full tryhard Andymage mode! So that's why there are 9k rewards. But I didn't promote the esport rewards in a big way. I just wanted them there as an option for fans. I'm really grateful everyone said yes to helping the Kickstarter. Though some of the esport talent are having fun with it. I heard Sheever was winding the other talent up at TI6 because she was the first to sale out Though Karma hit and someone decided to move their pledge over to Sing_sing shortly afterwards What are your expectations for Diabotical? Do you think it will be able to compete with Overwatch and CS:GO (Esports scene-wise)? We hope to offer something good to old and new fans of arena fps. I don't mind if we are not as big as Overwatch or CS:GO, since we are such a small team on a limited budget. So I doubt we will ever be as big as CS:GO. Though I wouldn't be surprised if our tournament finals are close in terms of spectators to an Overwatch final. Overwatch is still quite hard to watch. But it's getting better as the commentators improve and yeah, development things too. If I was in the Blizzard esport team I would focus of course on the obvious spectator experience, But also heavily on player story lines. The most interesting thing about esports are the people who play it. Riot did a great job with that initially, though now it feels a bit like reality TV over there. I described Overwatch esports to Bruno recently as being the American football of esports. So let's see how it improves over the years. The kickstarter mentioned an emphasis on modding tools. It seems to me that mod tools are typically either very robust but have a significant barrier to entry, or very limited but very easy to pick up. The kickstarter video seemed to show off some very approachable modding tools. Is there still support for more drastic changes to weapons and maps to creates game modes or types of weapons not currently in the game? Are there game modes or weapons from other shooters that someone couldn't come close to replicating with the modding tools? Modding tools I'm gonna use this answer to give an overview of modding. Let's separate this into map editing, cosmetics (weapons, skins, maps...) and what we actually call modding internally (creating new game modes). Maps Regarding maps, the goal is to have a map editor that anybody can pick up in a few seconds, yet allows you to create something that conforms to the art direction of the game. We are using a 3D uniform grid for this purpose. In a nutshell you do a surface area selection dragging your mouse and then you use the wheel mouse to push to make a concavity or pull to create new blocks. The map editor will tessellate good looking coherent geometry automatically from that binary grid, you can see this showcased in the Kickstarter video, but that is an older theme, we have nicer stuff now that we'll showcase in our development blog when we are ready. Now, any block or group of blocks can have different tessellation styles. Tessellation styles may also have further customization like a selection of color accents or material variations. To further decorate your map you can attach elastic elements to a surface (billboards, decals, displays) or place props which act like blocks but have sizes bigger than a single block like 4x2x4, for example ramps. Some of these props will be lighting elements that will provide the lighting to the scene. Now, as you get serious with mapping you'll need some advanced tools, like auto-mirroring (for CTF maps, for example), the ability to copy paste blocks, slice the map or extend the map from a slice to tweak sizes, mass replacement of properties, etc. All of those things are in the engine already accessible through commands you can bind, we just need to build a friendly interface for it and this is one of the things that we have left to do and the main reason we haven't shown the editor much yet. Some small details are in the air, like whether we'll allow props to not be aligned to the grid, or free-floating light entities that have no correspondence to a represented light source, which some people may miss but have usability implications that need to be considered. (A likely compromise is that we'll allow you to bend some rules through console commands or an advanced UI mode but make sure everything you need is in the simple graphical interface). The intended audience of the map editor is anybody who may have an idea for a map, we want users to be able to produce well-received maps without having any field-specific knowledge about 3D content creation or game development. Weapons, skins and other cosmetics Obviously, you'll need to have some 3D modelling experience to create this kind of content. We will however try to make it as straightforward as possible. The engine loads straight FBX files directly for models, which is broadly supported. We have tested it successfully with Maya, 3DS Max, Modo and Cinema4D. Unfortunately the FBX files exported by Blender (last time I tried) are an older profile that our engine cannot load, but for these you just need to download the Autodesk FBX Converter tool from Autodesk's website (it's free) and convert to a newer profile, FBX 2013 works well. Among the cosmetics you'll be able to do are skins, weapons, weapon attachments and map editor tessellation themes. Doing a map editor tessellation theme will be the most ambitious content creation task, the easiest way to start is to take a currently existing theme (that you can just take from the game installation folder, it's a bunch of FBX files) and start replacing geometry. Although it's a painstaking process I think we'll get quite a few of those by the community since it's quite a gratifying task to see your theme come to life and have everything just connect magically. Once you do a tessellation theme you can submit it and people can use it in their maps. Soft modding Soft modding refers to the ability to change the parameters of a game without changing the ruleset or game logic. This will be straightforward to do just by changing starting variables just like you would do in the older games. The difference here is we have take it quite far parametrizing physics so that people can create all sorts. Already, with what we have, you could theoretically replicate a big chunk of the games of the genre. Hard modding Hard modding refers to the ability to create new game logic (new game modes). Now the thing about having a native SDK for this purpose is that we couldn't run the servers for such games in our infrastructure (because of the obvious security implications, and we also cannot truly trust any VM approach). We would like to be able to run mods in our infrastructure and not having them be second-class citizens of the game ecosystem, so that modders can take advantage of our matchmaking and tournament system. So what we are going to do instead is to provide functional blocks through the map editor that carry out different functions so that people can do 95% of the mods out there. For the other 5% we can take requests over time and add the necessary blocks. For example we have a block trait that defines a control area, and another invisible block that you can place anywhere in the map that can hold a timer, the timer can be linked to the control area if you want it to go down when the area is controlled by a team. You can specify that the timer block implies a victory when it reaches it's set target time. With this alone you can already do a dozen different classical team modes. This is the extent of the modding that we have implemented right now. Further functional elements that we plan to add before release are things like blocks that can spawn bots. The block spawner can be linked to different blocks to set a path. Then we can also have turret, etc, you probably get the point. We will post about this in detail in the development blog when it's stable and we have tested it live in our infrastructure. We will of course impose limits, for example, on how many bots you can spawn and care will need to be taken to avoid circular dependencies of functional blocks that may crash our servers. There are also a lot of cool things that can be done with this approach but I'll save them for later. What's in the works for an Anti-Cheat for Diabotical ? This is unfortunately not an easy question to answer since the reality is that ultimately you can not control what people do with their computers. We will, however, try to do the best we can given the predicament.
What kind of support would you be willing to offer event organisers? Things like event based skins that split revenue have become the norm and help both those running events and those competing financially. Do you have any other ideas on how you and other developers could be supporting events? Yeah lots, Our tournament system will offer in-game promotion for those organizers complete with admin tools. plus they can upload sponsor logos and their logos to maps in the tournament pool. We basically want to make sure if someone is doing a tournament which is bringing value to our community, we help them the best we can. A lot of organizers still don't get the help I think they should from developers whether it be promotion or financial support. You'll get more info on this kind of stuff the closer we get to launch. Mekchu fucked around with this message at 23:29 on Aug 30, 2016 |
|
#
?
Aug 30, 2016 17:04
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 26, 2024 16:56 |
|
|
Kickstarter is over, both the Co-Op Modes are going to be included (race & survival) and the beta is still TBA but they've stated previously that once they finish up the mapmaking tool they'll be ready for the beta, which is expected to take around 2 months.
Mekchu fucked around with this message at 10:36 on Sep 1, 2016 |
|
#
?
Sep 1, 2016 10:31
|
|