My site is www.shogunmod.com. I am still trying to figure a name for the game, so if you have any ideas, please help me out. It is Shogun: ???? . Basic Plot: When the taiko of Japan dies. His son and heir kidnapped. That leaves Suspicion. And all fingers are pointed to your liege lord Toranaga. What do you do? It is rumored that Ishido, enemy of your Liege Lord is experimenting in Dark Magic. Ishido now is moving troops to attack the Kwanto, Toranaga''s Province. Toranaga starts to rally troops, but three of his border villages were mysteriously destroyed. Some say by a demon. Others say by monsters. But almost everyone agrees, by Ishido. How you fit in: You are a soldier for Toranaga. You signed up as infantry when your town and family were destroyed as the third village. That is where you start, right in battle. ------------------------------------- * = single player only # = Player Speed $ = Special Ability Toranaga Clan: - Light Infantry: Spear, Rope$, Short Bow, xxFast# - Medium Infantry: Naginata, Short Sword, Herbs$, xFast# - Samurai: Katana, Long Bow, Zen Long Jump$, Fast# - Ceremonial Samurai: Double Katana, Naginata, Wakasashi, Beserk$, Slow# Ishido Clan: - Heavy Infantry: Long Bow, Clave, Medium# (need a special for him) - Unead Samurai: Katana, Raise Dead Beta, Fast# - *Undead Sorcerer: Staff, Fast#, Raise Dead Primary$ - Demon Ninja: Doule Knifes, Ninja Stars, xxFast#, Caltraps$ - OverLord: Double Sided Battle Axe, slow#, Blaze$ Special Power List: - Herbs: Start with 3. You will be able to cultivate herbs in the map. Need a special enitity for this. But this cutivation can be in a later beta. When useing herbs (Assign a key, not a weapon slot) it adds 25% health to a team mate that is next to the player. It takes 5% of the stamina to cultivate herbs. - Rope: A Grappling Hook. Off screen sprite. Assign Key. Takes 12% of your stamina everytime you use it. - Zen Long Jump: Similar to the long jump in half life. Catapults the player about 10-20 yards away. You have to have at least 50% stamina to use. Takes 20% stamina when used. Use same controls to activate it as HLDM. - Beserk: Spins around attacking everyone in the radius. The player will need an animation to represent the spinning motion. Takes 32% of stamina. Must have at least 50% of your stamina to use. - Raise Dead Beta - When the person with power dies. He has a 1/3 chance of respanwing where he died. Takes no stamina. - Raise Dead Primary- Don''t worry about for now. Single player aspect. - Caltraps: Caltraps are dropped to the ground and when a player runs/walks over them, it hurts them and makes them go slower. - Blaze: Takes 18% of stamina for every second of blaze. Fires a blast of energy (Lighting or Fire, havn''t decided) infront of the player. It hurts ANYONE infront of it. Goes about 2-3 yards. Weapon Look Up: - Spear: Quick Attack. Enemy loses 2% of stamina when hit. 8-12 pts of damage. - Short Bow: Arrows do 10-15 pts of damage. Arros go a medium speed. - Naginata: Primary attack does a melee attack, 15-18 pts of damage. Second attack throws the Naginata. A thrown naginata does 30-50 pts of damage. You can only hold one naginata at a time. You can pick up naginatas. - Short Sword: SLows attacks due to weight. Does 12-16 pts of damage. 2nd attack does a back stab that does 32-48 damge(slower attack rate when backstabbing). 2nd attack takes 24-50% of your stamina. - Katana: Quick Attack. Does 16-20 pts of damage. - Double Katana: 1st attack does a double swing. Does 22-33 pts of damage. Takes 5% of your stamina. 2nd attack does Beserk Attack. See Beserk Info. - Wakasashi: Can only be used once. Can not be picked up. When thrown does 100-150 pts of damage. - Clave: Similar to a spear, but uses a swinging motion. Does 23-31 pts of damage. Takes 30% of stamina away from the person it hits. - Staff: Does 4-6 pts of damage. - Double Knifes: Ex Quick attack rate. Does 6-8 pts of damage. - Ninja Stars: Throwable weapon. Fast. Does 12-30 pts of damage on impact. Does 2-4 pts of damage every 2 seconds over a 30 second period. - Double Sided Battle Axe: Slow attack. Does 20-47 pts of damage. Character Descriptions: - Light infantry: Fitting clothes. No armor. Has a pony tail on the back of his head. - Medium Infantry: Has clothes under his thin armor. His armor consists of a total of 4 plates. 1 on each thigh. 1 on each buttox. On his chest, use a normal chest. We can texture the breast plate. has a pony tail on his back. He also has a flag pole on his back. If you don''t understand what a flag pole is, reply with that. - Heavy Infantry: I have a picture of the back of him. www.shogunmod.com/images/hs.jpg I think it is. He is biger and bulkier. He has more clothes and plates on him. He should also look evil. With horns or the such on him. - Samurai: Don''t do him until I get the pictures of him online. He needs to look how I want him to. - Ninja Demon: Aporx half the size of a normal person. Needs to look scrawny and quick. Has a tight fitting ninja suit with a hood. Depending on polys, you can give him a tail with a pointy end. - Undead Samurai: Similar to the samurai, but with bones and no flesh. Wait until you get the samurai pics. - Over Lord: A big demon. Not much bigger than a human. This guys has reversed knees. He really needs to look as evil as possible. This is a demon after all. GamePlay: I am still sorting gameplay thru my mind at the moment. So wait untill that comes in. Team based...duh. Thanks for your guy''s help! Ferrett www.shogunmod.com Its your time to choose.

Would:
Shogun: Evil Dark

Be a good title?
Ferrett

www.shogunmod.com
Its your time to choose.

And btw, I copy and pasted my original post from an email to my team. So it says things like: "Do do this yet" . Please just ignore those statements, just trying to show you what I have in mine.
-Ferrett

www.shogunmod.com
Its your time to choose.

First off I got no experience with creating halflife mods, but isnt Halflife2 on the way? Will a HL mod be portable to HL2? Just from an outsiders point of view, wouldnt it be better to create a mod like that with a new engine to increase it''s lifetime?

True that tf2 is coming out. HalfLife 2 hasn''t been anounced, and as far as I know, development has not started. The mod will be portable to tf2. And since the engine are related, it will easy to port the code. The models and maps will easily be ported. But I was mainly just asking, what do you think about the gameplay? Flaws? Additions? General Comments?
Ferrett

www.shogunmod.com
Its your time to choose.

drats. No more comments?

www.shogunmod.com
Its your time to choose.

Okay, since I''m the resident Complainer About Almost Every Game Being Medieval, I''m compelled to respond to this...

Cool!

It sounds like you have cool characters and a cool setting. I like the idea of team play, and that the different characters have different uses.

I''d love to hear more about gameplay, though. Especially I''d be interested in hearing how you''re going to deal with the melee / sword combat that''s implied, especially in the face of lag.

Also, I''m interested in hearing more about how teams need each other, and what some of the missions would be like. I''ve always been a fan of concerted effort, and I could see something like this working similar to the old co-op Doom maps where one guy had to throw a switch while another guy ran through a door to flip a lever (fighting baddies all along the way )

BTW, depending on how important it is to you, you may want to work on strengthening the story (the Writing Forum would be good for this!)

--------------------
Just waiting for the mothership...

I''m just wondering why you chose to use Half-Life as your engine-of-choice? I see all the ''quakies'' as being out-of-date.
//BLATANT PLUG
Use the Unreal Engine!
//End Blatant Plug
Here are what I see as the bonus'' of the Unreal Engine, and the downside of the Quakies.
1.)Incomplete packaging. Unreal ships with everything needed to make simple mods right out of the box. Even to make the simplest mods with the quakies you need an SDK.
2.)Combinability. You want to play Excessive Overkill but also be able to run up walls, double-jump, and freeze in mid-jump? With the Unreal Engine, thats no prob, just a few extra clicks before you start a game, and bang, customizeability up through the teeth. With the quakies this involves a recompiling of all the code to make an appropriate DLL.*blah*
3.)User Interface. Unreal->Windows-like pulldown menus. Quakies->Out of date simple button-based menus that we have all seen since the Doom days...blah.
4.)Need for additional downloading of tools. Unreal ships with its own map/script-editor, a script-compiler, and what amounts to probly 80% of the actual code of the game! With the quakies you need the right map-editor, an SDK, all this extra crap.
5.)Mod Updateability/Portability. Unreal->Unreal Tourney->Unreal2 == only change needed is (probably) utilizing new features. Quake->Half-Life/Quake2->Sin/SoF/Quake3 == ROFL yeah right. Lets instead try coding an entirely new version of the mod using the original one as a source of pseudo-code
6.)AI. As you improve the Unreal''s AI, they begin ACTING more advanced, camping near power-items, picking up weapons/armor simply so you can''t have them. Quakies seem to get REALLLLLY accurate on the highest setting, but not much else...they jump around a lot more....[NOTE:I Have to credit Half-Life''s squad-based AI...that stuff is amazing]
7.)Graphics Engine. Yes, I''ll admit, the Unreal software-based graphics suck. But when you start using OpenGL utilizing the S3TC textures...it looks..well...Jaw-Dropping. And besides the point, the Unreal Engine has a compatable rendering system for about any type of card. The Quakies are pretty much OpenGL-pimps, and even then, you have to CRANK the resolution to get them to look sweet.

Anyway, just wanted to post in to see if you were going to blindly use an aging engine simply because it is the most well known.
This RtS-Babble© was brought to you by....
-Run_The_Shadows
-Run_The_Shadows@excite.com

Wavinator: I know I need to strengthen the story =) My writing skills aren''t up to par like they should be. For our sword and melee combat we will be using many things. Main thing is like the Spear Versus the Katana. The spear are used not only to kill but to paralyze opponents so that they can''t move/run/special attack. So if you have 3 light infantry with spears against a big baddy overlord who can blaze. The spears can attack and drain away his stamina a lot quicker. Thus causing the big baddy attack "blaze" to be un accessible. Just one example.

Run/shadows: Eek big post!
1.)Incomplete packaging. Unreal ships with everything needed to make simple mods right out of the box. Even to make the simplest mods with the quakies you need an SDK.

What my mod does do to take the effort, other mods might not do. Thus shows my teams dedication to the project and our thirst to see our project suceed.

2.)Combinability. You want to play Excessive Overkill but also be able to run up walls, double-jump, and freeze in mid-jump? With the Unreal Engine, thats no prob, just a few extra clicks before you start a game, and bang, customizeability up through the teeth. With the quakies this involves a recompiling of all the code to make an appropriate DLL.*blah*

We havn''t planned any of those ideas. But if they were to be put in, my coder chiznitz is eager to do it, and wouldnt have a problem recompiling the dll. It might be harder than just doing what unreal does, but who over all feels good? The person who works hard to do things right, or the person who does something because it is the easier of the two?

3.)User Interface. Unreal->Windows-like pulldown menus. Quakies->Out of date simple button-based menus that we have all seen since the Doom days...blah.

Menus are a boor. I find that a easy click of 4 buttons gets me into a halflife game. I don''t like dragging menus and the such. I favor easy accessibility over fancy menus. What works well proven, should work for us. And if old boring menus are the problem, we can "spice" them up! =)

4.)Need for additional downloading of tools. Unreal ships with its own map/script-editor, a script-compiler, and what amounts to probly 80% of the actual code of the game! With the quakies you need the right map-editor, an SDK, all this extra crap.

See the 1.) answer

5.)Mod Updateability/Portability. Unreal->Unreal Tourney->Unreal2 == only change needed is (probably) utilizing new features. Quake->Half-Life/Quake2->Sin/SoF/Quake3 == ROFL yeah right. Lets instead try coding an entirely new version of the mod using the original one as a source of pseudo-code

If worse comes to worse we can port the mod to the tf2 engine. It uses the same .bsp, and .mdl. The only thing is code, and chiznitz(the coder) likes to learn new things, and likes more of a project at times. It won''t be that hard taking they work the same engine, and the same style coding.

6.)AI. As you improve the Unreal''s AI, they begin ACTING more advanced, camping near power-items, picking up weapons/armor simply so you can''t have them. Quakies seem to get REALLLLLY accurate on the highest setting, but not much else...they jump around a lot more....[NOTE:I Have to credit Half-Life''s squad-based AI...that stuff is amazing]

Since we are focusing on mp to get a fan base at first, ai is not a biggy. But once sp goes under way, ai is going to be a priority so we can compete with the latest and greatest.

7.)Graphics Engine. Yes, I''ll admit, the Unreal software-based graphics suck. But when you start using OpenGL utilizing the S3TC textures...it looks..well...Jaw-Dropping. And besides the point, the Unreal Engine has a compatable rendering system for about any type of card. The Quakies are pretty much OpenGL-pimps, and even then, you have to CRANK the resolution to get them to look sweet.

I love the half life engine. And I have seen engines off the quake one (my friends engine) be able to use tiffs for textures. I ahve now quarks with quake. I find it reliable.


I hope this answers your questions! Thanks a ton for your comments!
Ferrett


www.shogunmod.com
Its your time to choose.

Forgot to mention:

If you were fighting the overlord with only katanas. The damage is increased, but at the same time, the overlord has blaze which will counter the katanas easily. Another strategy against the overlord is the fact that the overlord is slow. So you can fire arrows, retreat, fire arrows, and retreat. Ect. The light infantry can use their rope to get to high places to fire down upon the enemy. Do you guys think it is a good idea to add a stamina requirement to fire an arrow? Cause I have taken archery, and it does take strength.
Ferrett

www.shogunmod.com
Its your time to choose.