Building an FPS #1: Getting Started

We're building another game!

For years we've heard from you, our users, that game development is a big topic that you guys want to learn. This past December, we committed a big effort to this request in the form of a Tower Defense Learning Flow. It's been a pretty big hit! You guys weren't lying.

Today, we're very excited to share that we're working on another game development Flow centered around the first-person-shooter genre. As with the Tower Defense Flow, our approach with this project is to deliver game development education in a two-fold method:

1. Offer a fully-playable game. When we create a CGC tutorial, we believe it's important to legitimize the education with example/result imagery that showcases the workflow(s) we're teaching. With game development, what better way to do this than by sharing an actual game that our community can play? Granted they'll be smaller games, like one level instead of many, since we're only a 4-person team - but a polished, fun, hopefully addicting game nonetheless!
2. Release beginning-to-end training about creating that game. If we can prove the project with a polished game, then education about that game becomes that much more valuable. Shortly after the game is released, a thorough Learning Flow will follow that teaches the entire process of creating the game from conceptualization and design, asset creation with Blender, and development with Unity.

F.P.S.

We're almost one-and-a-half months into production on our first person shooter prototype and we're having a blast with it! We've been referring to it as "The Range". It's going to be a beautiful sci-fi-ish aesthetic complete with glorious harsurface environment details, a robot character, and yes, of course bad-ass weapons. Also you can expect some CGC easter eggs o'plenty!

THE CHARACTER

Yeah robots! Who doesn't like robots? We sure do. Tim came up with some sweet design that we are translating into Blender.

THE LEVEL

The level is self-contained as a fairly large structure of hallways, rooms, and a large open courtyard. Jonathan Lampel has spear-headed the level design and after 5 versions, we're really happy with the way it's playing.

THE WEAPONS

Our list of weapons was initially 5 but along the way we decided to double up functionality, which makes the current count 3:

• An accurate, high-powered pistol that can switch to a sub-machine-gun rate of fire at the cost of accuracy.
• A rifle that fires accurately in bursts or semi-automatic (not sure yet which) and can transform into a sniper rifle at the click of a button. The sacrifice is rate of fire for accuracy and zoom.
• Finally, a rocket launcher to blow all the things up.

Here's the design sheet from Tim:

THE GAMEPLAY

Jonathan Gonzalez is hard at work as the sole developer for the game. He's single-handedly building all game mechanics. Here's a taste of the prototype in action: