Wrack - An arcade-style, cel-shaded FPS

[Carnevil]

Hey everyone!

My name is Brad Carney, and I'm the lead developer behind a new indie FPS called Wrack!



ABOUT THE GAME

Wrack is fairly unique game in that it fuses a lot of elements from FPS's with those of platformers. While you have large, action-packed levels to explore like in Doom and Duke Nukem 3D, you have all sorts of nerve-wracking (HA!) jumps, heavily themed levels, and Megaman-style bosses every couple of levels or so. The end result is something we call a "first-person platformer", and we're loving the result so far!

MEDIA

Here's a screenshot of one of the recently released levels:


... and here's the trailer:


AVAILABILITY

Wrack is currently available NOW! You can pre-order Wrack and save 33% by doing it now! You'll get the latest build of the game, as well as access to updates to the game as we finish it up! Plus, you can be part of the community and tell me what you'd like to see in the future!

We've got a lot more at our website, which is: http://www.wrackgame.com/

Anyway, I hope you're liking what you're seeing so far! There's plenty more to come - in fact, we're working on some great new stuff right now! Stay tuned!

Thanks everyone!

[lennard]

Very polished and terrific art direction.

Is that your game engine?

It's odd to knock somebody who has clearly done good work but... I feel like you guys could have done better with the story. That's especially odd for me to say given that I'm usually about game play first... but your story: http://www.wrackgame.com/about/ really leaves me flat.

While I'm at holding you to a higher level... your floatey enemies could use a sine wave (perhaps with a little randomness thrown in) or some acceleration/deceleration on their movement. It slightly mars a really terrific video.

Good luck with your great looking game.

[Applewood]

Can the poster of http://forums.indiegamer.com/showthr...3-basic-pistol please take note?!

Cool looking title, hope it does well.

[Bad Sector]

That looks interesting enough and i might buy it once i have some money available for games :-).

Is it going to be available in Mac OS X and Linux? IIRC from other places where you posted this game, it uses a modified DOOM engine so it should be portable, right?

[Carnevil]

Thanks a lot guys!

Lennard: Yes, it's an engine I've made from scratch. I made the Doom 2 expansion Skulltag, so thankfully I have some experience working with 3D engines! Also, the story isn't something we've been able to focus too much on with being an indie with a tiny budget and all. Honestly, story isn't too important to a game like this anyway. It's mostly an excuse plot - just something to give you a reason to shoot at some monsters!

Bad Sector: We don't have any plans to port it to OS X or Linux ATM, but we'll see how much demand there is for that later. It's not based on the Doom engine, but it still should be plenty portable. The first platform other than PC that I'd like to target is the Xbox 360, so we'll see just how portable it is at that point.

[Bad Sector]

It might be me, but i'd consider Mac OS X and Linux more important than XBox360, if only because a twitch shooter plays better with a keyboard + mouse than a controller (also all the woes about XBLA and XBLIG that indies on the platform mention over the years) :-P.

[Carnevil]

I certainly prefer keyboard/mouse, but using a 360 controller really isn't that bad. The first time I played Wrack using a controller, I was amazed at how well it worked. Since then, I've added native 360 controller support (actually just got done playing through with one), and I think it'd be able to do just fine on the 360 with minimal tweaks.

Yeah, I've also heard similar indie game woes (I recall reading about one game that made as much money in 6 days on Steam as it did in the few years it had been on XBLIG), but certainly there are a lot of titles that have done very well on XBLA or XBLIG (Limbo, Super Meat Boy, Bastion, and Braid all come to mind).

It's not necessarily one or the other though - if Wrack gets popular, there's nothing to stop it from being developed for multiple other platforms at the same time.

Oh, and by the way, some people had complained that some of the earlier levels were too dark. We're working on addressing that now! Here's a nice before/after shot of the beginning of the third level:

[Carnevil]

Okay, well we just got done doing a whole bunch of work on the lighting, as well as the color in general! I'm using a lot more hard shadows (to give better contrast) and brighter more colorful lights. We also brightened and increased the saturation on the green/brown texture set. It's definitely looking much better IMO!

Here are a few good examples:



What do you guys think?

[Bad Sector]

Yeap, this looks much better in my opinion :-).

There is one thing bothering me in the first screenshot though: if the "natives" of the world are so tall, shouldn't the ceilings be taller too? Right now it seems too cramped from their perspective.

(see the first Unreal for an example of this: for the player things were very big and tall, but the world was built for Nali and Skaarj, which were bigger/taller than the player but normal for them)

[Carnevil]

Thank you! I definitely agree!

The plot of the first episode pretty much revolves around an alien invasion, so they and their robot army aren't actually natives to the world. So, as long as everything is the appropriate height for you the player, I'm not too concerned

[Carnevil]

Great news! Wrack is currently ON SALE! Throughout QuakeCon (which we're headed to) it's going to be a whopping 50% off! So, for some of you guys who have been on the fence for awhile, now would be a great time to check it out! With the sale, it's less than $5 now!

Along with the sale, we also put out a nice juicy update which, among other things, has a ton of lighting/texturing updates (as seen in the screenshots above). The levels really do look a ton better now. I'm quite pleased!

[Carnevil]

Just wanted to let you guys know that we're now on Desura! To celebrate, we have a NEW TRAILER which you can see here:



On top of that, we're now on Steam Greenlight! If you like what you've seen here and would like to help support us, we'd appreciate your vote! You can view our page here:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfile...s/?id=95521749

[Carnevil]

We're now on the verge of releasing a massive update! This one's got a new level, a new texture set, a new weapon, and a whole lot more! Here's a little sample of it:



You can find more screenshots and details of the forthcoming update here! Feedback is appreciated!

Thanks!