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== Official Blog ==
1.27.16 - FPS World Building Hybrid, Gunscape, Releases on March 2, 2016
Genre: Sandbox/Shooter
Publisher | Developer: Blowfish Studios [ Twitter | Facebook | Youtube ]
Supported Players: Single-player | 20 Players (Online) | 4 Player Splitscreen
Release Date: March 2, 2016
ERSB Game Rating: Teen
Digital Download Size: TBA
Platform: PS4
Price: N/A
Minecraft + Quake + TimeSplitters = Gunscape
What is Gunscape?
What makes Gunscape different from typical FPS games is that the players create the gameplay. Inspired by the first-person shooters of the past that we loved, we're taking all the most memorable elements and putting them in a toolkit to be used and combined however you want. At its heart, Gunscape is an FPS construction kit. It's a game that lets you go wild with your creativity in a pumping action sandbox! Gunscape does this by providing easy-to-use tools based on a block-placement interface everybody's already familiar with to create single-player campaigns, co-op maps and multiplayer arenas and the functionality to share your creations with your friends. Don't like building stuff and just want to blast your way through hordes of monsters or duel with other players? Maps can also be shared, played and voted on by the whole world, so you'll always have new levels at your fingertips!
World Building
The game is organised into themes taken from the entire genre of FPS games, from the early classics to the modern triple-A stealth and war shooters. Each theme set contains unique world building blocks, player models, enemies (and bosses!), music tracks, skyboxes, special level elements (like traps and teleporters) and--of course--GUNS (plus bombs, bats, swords, flamethrowers, chainsaws, rocket launchers and much, much more. 38 weapons planned so far!). Assets from different sets are meant to be combined freely when building your worlds and the selection of content contained in each one has been carefully selected and planned out to avoid redundancy and to represent the truly iconic parts of the game it was inspired by.
It's important to us that anybody should be able to create their own levels. In the days of Doom and Build engine games level editors were simple enough that it didn't take long to learn how to create a whole new adventure for the player. The truly skilled could create impressive feats of architecture, but the rest of us could still create enjoyable challenges thanks to tightly-designed game engines that focused on making the core gameplay pure fun. In a game like that it doesn't matter how many times you test and tweak the layout to make your map the best it can be, or how abstract the level becomes as a result. This is the driving philosophy behind Gunscape.
Everyone in the team enjoys playing shooters and the whole office joins in on TF2 at lunch on Fridays, although that's being overtaken by Gunscape games lately We would love to be given the chance to provide this experience to everyone!
World Sharing
Of course, there's no point in creating great play experiences if nobody else gets to play them! Gunscape has a server to share your creations and the game has a built in map browser with filtering and voting system, so that anybody can have full access to every public player-created levels for free, regardless of which theme packs were used to make them. The available demo (more on this later) has game levels we have put together and we'll continue to add more as we complete new content to help show how much potential there is for you to create some truly amazing things with Gunscape!
Solo and online co-operative multiplayer level creation! Build maps at your own pace or invite friends to help out! Jump in and out of action mode while editing to test your level on the fly or just to blast one another.
Single-player campaign mode: play or create a sequence or branching tree of levels with or without a story. Build a whole self-contained adventure or a gauntlet of fearsome challenges.
Co-op mode: invite one or more friends to tackle a dedicated co-op map with you or take a single-player map and crank up the difficulty.
Multiplayer arenas: build a map with multiple spawn points and powerups and invite your friends or host a public game for some brutal online action using one of many multiplayer modes, including classics such as free-for-all and team deathmatch,capture the flag variants, king of the hill and domination/point capture modes and different tag/infection variants. We plan on including a lot of these, and to continue adding more, including flexible objectives like race to the finish which could be used to build multiplayer rocket jump courses or other types of challenge maps such as a competitive adventure through trap-filled dungeons, or hunter which awards points for killing monsters so you can create your own MP dinosaur safari.
Global and persistent map sharing: anyone can play the levels you share regardless of region (votes are recorded and can be displayed, just in case).
8+ themes @ release
38+ weapons @ release
16+ player avatars @ release
20+ enemies @ release
4+ multiplayer match modes @ release, probably more!
The Editor
Creative Mode and its multiplayer equivalent consist of a simple block placement interface in which elements, such as terrain blocks, are selected from your theme packs and placed in the world by clicking on the face of an existing block. You can easily copy or rotate already-placed elements with a single button press, and in the future you’ll also be able to select, flip, copy and paste large areas of your map to make things even easier. This style of editor should be familiar to most players--if you’ve ever played an Infiniminer-style game like Minecraft then you’re already qualified to make your own levels in Gunscape!
As mentioned, each theme is a set of elements such as player models, music tracks and skyboxes, but here’s a quick breakdown of the elements you’ll be able to directly place in your levels:
Ordinary terrain blocks make up the bulk of a level. These are generally cubes, but most themes will include a few angled blocks for constructing sloped ceilings, walls or floors.
Props are detailed objects like columns, statues or desks. They’re invaluable for decorating your stages and providing partial cover for players (note that props can be shot through in the pre-alpha version, but that’s temporary). Many props also act as light sources, like lamps or glowing computer screens.
Special elements, which covers everything from doors to elevators, teleporters, lava floors, deadly laser emitters and spike traps.
Special elements can generally be active or disabled, and you might wish to use this functionality to create interactive level logic using trigger blocks, which can mean invisible triggers, sneaky tripwires and pressure plates or obvious elements like buttons and levers. These are fairly straightforward to use: keep an eye out for a full post on the trigger system in a future update!
Window blocks are a special block type which include transparent sections through which a selected environmental scene can be viewed. They aren’t “real” windows, meaning you don’t need to build an actual outside environment to be viewed through them. Instead you can simply plop a few windows into walls of your spaceship and players will be able to see a starfield--or whatever scene you choose--through them. Window blocks make creating interior spaces a lot easier and allow for tricks such as setting your world skybox to an ocean surface scene, and your window scene to an underwater view, so that players can begin outside on the surface before descending into a deep sea structure.
Enemies are one of the most important features of a singleplayer/co-op map--although there’s nothing stopping you from placing them in a multiplayer arena map if you wish. Each theme contains several smaller monsters in addition to a larger heavy-hitter or boss-level monster. Every foe has individual AI with behaviour based on the style of game it’s inspired by, and will automatically pathfind around the environments you create. Military guards will patrol until they spot you (but won’t leave the elevation they were placed on); raptor dinosaurs attempt to roam in packs, encircling their prey; and zombie mutants stand immobile until alerted--at which point they scramble up the nearest wall and try to leap at you.
Finally, you should finish off a stage with a sprinkling of important invisible markers: weapon and ammo spawns (which may or may not respawn depending on the game mode/server settings); music blocks, which are used to lend atmosphere to your stage by changing the current music track at key moments, dialogue blocks which are cues for on-screen text you might want to show your players; and multiplayer spawn points and objectives, if your map is meant to be used in an arena game mode.
There’s no limit to how many different elements you use in your level. And while there is a maximum size, it’s huge: if you made your level as wide as possible it’d take players hours to walk from one side to the other!