DEATHZONE

September 2022 - January 2023

DEATHZONE was an arena multiplayer FPS that focused on customization! Inspired by Quake and Half-Life!

The gameplay was pretty standard; find weapons and items, kill other players and move fast.

However, the cool thing about the game would be its weapon variants! (inspired by Plants Vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare 2)

You could choose which weapon variant you would get upon picking up a specific weapon type (melee, pistol, shotgun, rifle, RPG, energy gun).

This allowed for basically an infinite amount of posibilities without bloating the player's inventory (unlike in HL1).

The matches would also be customizable, a bit too much in fact. It was planned to to give match/server hosters the ability to change pretty much anything about a match, like forcing specific weapon variants, banning some, changing the player's health and more.

There would also be a ton of cosmetics for players to wear, and all of them would be free!!! Like the game!!!

Oh also, it was also somewhat planned to add a singleplayer mode post-launch, based on HL1's.

Also also, the game would include a level editor. I tried making it and........yeah.

Development

How DEATHZONE got started was actually simple!

Basically, a friend of mine wanted to make a game, so she hit me up to make an arena shooter and I agreed.

I would do the programming, she would do the modelling & textures, and another friend would make the music.

There was one problem though: I did not know how to make Unity games! I mean, I have tried it before then, but with little to no experience, I was doing the very dumb thing of making an ambitious first person shooter, and what also did not help at all was my inexperience with networking!

But two things helped me: Unity's extensive documentation, and Riptide, an easy to use networking library by Tom Weiland!

So I got to work.

The game's development phase was based on milestones. Basically, I would implement a set offeatures, build the client and server projects and send them to my friends.

Sadly, we were never able to playtest the game together, as it required one of us to enable port forwarding on our router and also share our IP address. Needless to say, no one understandably wanted to do it.

But development continued on! However, the overall game was very buggy, which started to take a toll on my motivation.

Also, the game never had client prediction! A feature that is mandatory for online games like this! I will spare on what it is, but I tried implementing it. It did not work.

After 3 months in development, I decided that the game was too ambitious for my abilities at the time, so I stopped working on it. I did try to come back in March, but motivation only lasted for one day.

So the project was dead.

Or was it...?

DEATHZONE (sbox pre-scene-system)

After March 2023, Before December 2023

It only lasted like 2 days.

I had a really hard time figuring out how to make games in sbox prior to the Scene System. So I entirely gave up.

I'm sorry that I can't provide at least the date of this, as I don't remember.

So the project was dead again.

Or was it...?

DEATHZONE (sbox with its scene system)

February 2024 - April 2024

I thought the game would be made this time.

Since the last time, sbox got rewritten, now having a scene system like Unity and Unreal.

And at that point I had more experienced with Unity, which experience can be used on sbox.

And... sbox has built-in multiplayer support! Nice!

So I got to wor-

I had difficulties with the rocket projectile and it demotivated me. I actually did not know how to properly make sbox games so I gave up.

I wish I could show footage of this version, but I sadly cannot find it. And I can't open the project anymore, probably because of changes to sbox.

Also one last thing, one core idea that was planned during this time and not the other times was to include a sniper weapon type. I don't know why I have not thought of that before.

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