The development team consists entirely and solely of me. I'm on level design, texturing (level/effects), SENTs and effects, weapon and gamemode coding.

Oh hey it's another idea that reminds me of me.

It's not an idea, it's well into development.

The effects look cool.

LaserDance has already been made. An original idea is suppose to be made. Looks cool though.

Just because it uses lasers doesn't mean it's a copy of laser dance, try re-reading the opening post.

Looks pretty cool, keep up the good work!

Firstly, it's not a clone, secondly it's been specified that gameplay is more important than originality.

I think i've seen this somewhere else. Nice though.

You won't get very attached to your team though, and in the end, everybody wins
You should just make the player with the most tags win.

Yeah, I've thought of this. Obviously it is an everybody wins kinda deal, and there is also a possibility time will run out before all players are swapped to the same team. I'm just going to rank players under a set of different achievements:

Underneath each player will be your own placing in the runnings for that particular achievement. For example: If Jo The Shmo got Power Crazed, it could show me as 2/11 to represent 2nd place out of 11 players, and how close I was to getting it. Battlefield 2/2142 had something a little bit like this.

This would show on a scoreboard sort of deal at the end of the round.

I fucking love laser tag, used to play it in the old CoD

Minor update.


Above: Spawn room for FURY. This will pretty much be the design for all spawn rooms on LT_SAON.


Above: Targeting reticule for the laser rifle. Compression from jpeg screenshots got to it. It rotates slowly.


Above: Dodgy screenshot of the laser shoot effects.

Bots are the least photogenic thing I have ever met.

I will start to beta test this on an available server in a few days.

Looks interesting.

ENTER: Guided Projectile Testing!



You thought 3 weeks of no activity means the gamemode died! You were very wrong my friend. Nah I've been working away, just haven't made as much headway as I wanted to considering the time. Here's a changelog of progress.

This list isn't quite complete but I am somewhat ashamed at the lack of progression. I figure with respect to having something to show in the thread I may have better motivation to complete things faster. Although it can be said technically I'm procrastinating right now.

So anyway if you've been following this mess of a post so far, you're probably totally confused about the powerup system. Here's how it works: Powerups are available in three different flavors, and you have one slot for each of them. You can pick up an accuracy powerup; a primary powerup that makes your primary fire more accurate. You can then wander around and pick up say a shotgun secondary fire pickup, and your shotgun burst will have less of a spread because you have the accuracy powerup in addition. The main types of powerup are Primary (accuracy, etc.) which affect your weapon settings and Secondary which unlocks extra abilities on your weapon such as shotgun burst, guidable rockets, sniper scope and more. I have heaps of ideas for both and intend there to be lots of variety in powerup.

There is also a third and very rare type of powerup known as the Player powerup. These upgrade your abilities as a player and I only have 3 ideas: ShieldBoost (200% shields, better regen), Stealth (near invisibility) and Speed (run faster, jump further).

You can only have one powerup of each type at a time. Player powerups are limited by time (run out after 60 seconds or less depending on how balance works out) but the other powerups you can have for the duration of the round. Depending on how playtesting goes I may strip your powerups if you get tagged (shield broken).

The powerups are mainly what helps the gamemode to stand out over other shooters, since it gives it some variety. Loads of creative powerups are possible and help to weigh the odds in a round. The idea is that you'll start and gain a number of powerups to upgrade your weapon as you go. They will of course need rigorous balance testing.

Continuing this small novel of a post, powerups won't just spawn randomly from a list of some-suck some-uber powerups, they're organised by rarity. For example, the player powerups will all be very rare, and the simpler powerups like accuracy will be quite common. A powerup spawner itself will actually level in rarity the longer it has a powerup sitting on it, untaken. This encourages players to explore the map as the round progresses to search for the rarer powerups. You can also drop powerups out of a slot to replace them with a new powerup you found by pressing USE on the spawner.

Here's the current list of planned and semi-complete powerups. The ones with X's are more or less complete.
This is by no means a confirmed list, most of these are purely brainfarts and some of them are more feasible than others in terms of time commitment and usefulness.

In closing, feel absolutely free to contribute ideas for powerups and other gameplay things you'd like to see.

Edited:

Also I'm going to redo the OP soon.

o Proximity - Mine sits and explodes when somebody passes it. Refire is very slow. Icon ???

not sure how you're doing icons,

but how about a sort of plus, but more round shaped (like a mine) with a green light on top of it?

looks cool

I made two concepts from your suggestion, topview and cross-section. I'm not sure which I like more, so see which one is closer to what you had in mind. The only real design spec with these is they have to be very simply shaped so that they can scale down and fit on the HUD. So there's a hires 256x128 texture used on the spinning quads that the player runs into and picks up and then that texture is scaled down onto the hud at less than 64x32, so small details get missed out or look bad.

Topview concept


Cross-section concept


Both concepts scaled down into the upgrade indicator.


Edited:

On the left of the above two concepts is Accuracy and RapidFire primary powerups respectively.

Updated the OP with new media and a vid. Explained the game a bit better. Enjoy.

This looks pretty fucking awesome.

Very sexy map and HUD! Looking the like of it!

Looks amazing. Can we expect a release soon?

Yes. After a bit more work (specifically level design and HUD/scoring) I'm going to start testing it on a public server (probably one I run myself so it can be dedicated 24/7) which will be where people can start checking the gamemode out. Then after I'm happy with some of the basic balancing and logistics I'll set up a public SVN (with regular zip files containing recent SVN revisions) which will be beta releases of the gamemode.

I'm strongly looking forward to working on a server because gameplay will actually be what makes the game fun in the end, I'm also pretty keen on making some nice videos from actual gameplay footage. Bots don't allow much for screenshots or vids.

Nothing much else to say for today's post. I've been working on the level design but don't really want to show anything half baked. I've got some nice ideas and I'll have some good stuff to show off soon.

I really want to play this.

As do i.

I also want to map for this - will there be a FDG for this?

Sure. Hope this works on your end, I haven't tried making a FGD before. Seems to work fine in Hammer for me.



There are 5 entities, 4 of which are spawnpoints for each individual team. The 5th entity is the powerup enttiy. They're all prefixed with lt_ for ease.

so i herd u liek updatez

Today's media release.




The second two screenshots are of the Core Room. There's an observation deck as you might be able to see. Yes, there's a giant spinning fan under the floor. The room in the first picture splits off two ways, one way leading to the machinery/cell charge room and control room, (with a stairwell that will take players back up to the middle floor) and another way which will take players to the coolant room and a different stairwell to the middle floor. Somewhere around here there'll probably be a stairwell to the top floor. This level is pretty vertically challenging to map.

Added to the thread OP. So I figure I have a couple more days of intense mapping on this level until I get it all connected and sort out where the spawn rooms are going to go (there is a slight balance concern since some parts of the level will house rarer powerups. I also don't want to put spawn rooms right next to eachother since that will mess teams up). Once I do that, I need to fix the round end screen and then maybe I can playtest. I'm eagerly anticipating having people play. I'll be sure to update this thread with any further details on playtesting and betaing.

Wow, this looks great! Please continue! :D

Thank you! It helps to have the motivation that comments like yours give me. Currently I'm way busier than I expected to be so I've only been able to work on the gamemode very slowly. But I do have this to say:

The map (lt_saon) is totally finished, and just needs playtesting before I finalise it. I'm also currently configuring a server to do early beta playtesting. I will post connection details in a bit. Basically all that's left on the gamemode to do is the interface, scoring and powerups. I really hope I can nail this in time.

Edited:

Server Details Up! - See OP

Wait, am I playing LaserTag, or checkers?


Also, I didn't imagine a gun that shoots light, to have recoil.

The map looks great.

Server doesn't update SVN immediately, I had broken downloads. It should work now though. I've been working on the HUD so I haven't been testing in server lately.

The recoil is just purely for balance, but the idea is that it's not really an emission of light, more a burst of energy focused into a laser.

should make the arenas dark and have neon and things

Update: HUD progress.

I've totally changed the HUD over to the Fretta VGUI system rather than just being HUDPaint based, and I've also added a new topbar with a team indicator, countdowns, and counters for how you're doing in tags and swaps. Check it out:

I'd like to extend thanks to all the players who joined the server during the session we had earlier, it was a blast. LaserTag is turning out to be real fun to play with people, appropriately hectic with lots of players. Here's some awesome screenshots of what went down:







Major bugs with file and resource sharing have been corrected, and other minor bugs are being investigated and fixed. The gamemode is also nicely balanced.

It looks really pretty.

Yeah, looks good!

Thanks guys. And also thanks to the other round of testers who joined the server to play today, who patiently waited while I fixed a couple showstoppers.

So after hours and hours of adjusting and tweaking and coding and fixing and oh god, I've finished the long procrastinated round complete screen. Check it out:

This gamemode looks amazing! I really need to find some fretta servers that are hosting some of these contest entries that are being tested, as I want to play them all!

Can you please make a scoreboard similar to conman's? On the f1 screen?

I'm not quite sure what you mean.

Update
So this is the 11th hour. I've packed everything up into a more or less final version ready for release. It's on the server now as the final playtest is underway. If anyone feels like joining in the next hour I'll give you a chocolate fish. Or something.

I am quite nervous about packing up a massive showstopper bug.