The GitHub languages thing shows it's 82% PHP, 15% JS and some sprinkles with HTML/CSS. But what is the actual client made with? Is it in a different repository? Or is it all implemented in PHP? Impressive if so.
> This is low violence game
I love this description for a game that is all about shooting others in face, planting/defusing bombs and trying to survive while being shot at.
As a side-note, has the OP ever seen a football field? :) Seems to have a bunch of crosses and other out-of-place lines, but I guess the football isn't the focus so probably matters the least :)
I am not even opposed to violent videogames morally, I just wish there were more creativity in big budget gaming. One of the most interactive mediums available to society, and billions of dollars each year goes into another set of Shooty McMann goes Shooting, Guns Edition.
Sorry, small tangent. This project is still super impressive and I have played thousands of hours of CS so it's cool to see.
> I just wish there were more creativity in big budget gaming. One of the most interactive mediums available to society, and billions of dollars each year goes into another set of Shooty McMann goes Shooting, Guns Edition.
This is overly dismissive, and the sort of thing I'd expect on Reddit.
If you look at the most critically praised and fan praised AAA game of the last.. decade? It's Baldur's Gate 3. In the AAA-budget-quality space there's enough games out there released in the last few years without guns to keep you busy - Disco Elysium, Stardew Valley, Elden Ring, Minecraft, Persona, Witcher, Total War, Alan Wake(*) Stellaris are all in my "recently played" and there's no guns. Generally RPG, Strategy, racing, platformer style games avoid guns for the most part.
You've got AAA games that have guns in them that aren't focused on shooting - Xcom, Fallout come to mind where the guns are just a visual representation of a dice roll.
I know you mentioned "big budget gaming", but there's oodles of small budget games to play too. Balatro, Pacific Drive, Against the Storm, Dredge, Inscryption are all games I've played this year with no guns in them.
What does AAA-budget-quality mean? Minecraft was made by one person and is still a very simple game, utterly unlike the ‘genuinely AAA’ shooters parent was talking about. Same with Stardew Valley and probably several of the others you’re talking about.
Fallout might not be ‘focused on shooting’, but it still has the look of a typical FPS game. It’s as if game developers have mostly converged on a standard game design. There are exceptions, but there’s still so much untapped room to be more creative.
I think it is true that most money in the games industry goes into making games that heavily feature guns. Films are the same; even the seemingly non-violent premises apparently have to involve constant peril and frequent (gun) violence. Maybe it’s a particularly American thing.
Yup. I agree with the premise of the parent post, but they A) mistook the most critically acclaimed game, it being “The Last of Us” and B) named a whole slew of “indie” titles.
> they A) mistook the most critically acclaimed game, it being “The Last of Us”
I think there's some subjectivity in most critically acclaimed game, and decade. TLOU Part 2 [0] is "slightly" lower than BG3 [1] (to the point you're well into subjectivity), and the remaster [2] technically falls out of the decade criteria by 6 months. I think at the point you're arguing about trying to objectively clarify the best subjective option.
> named a whole slew of “indie” titles.
I named a whole slew of indie titles (in a separate category to things like BG3, Elden Ring, Withcher, Total War, but nonetheless) because the boundaries are fuzzy. Do you mean indie budget (Stardew valley definitely falls into that, but it's an incredibly polished experience, to the level of many AAA games), do you mean "a small team" like Dave the Diver [3], do you mean no publisher - Star Citizen is an indie game by that metric, with it's "indie" budget of $700 million. Or CDPR - they _are_ a publisher, funding their own games (that meet the no-guns criteria too IMO - Cyberpunk 2077 has guns but playing it like a third person shooter isn't really how the game is set up).
I deliberately used the "AAA-budget-quality" term to try and differentiate that; it's subjective (like all art and art reviews are), but for the most part, people (in my opinion) are talking about differentiating "production quality" when they talk about AAA and non-AAA games. First and second party studio games like Zelda, Mario, Crash Bandicoot, had small development teams and budgets that make many definitely-PC-indie games (e.g. Hades) look like blockbusters in comparison.
It was a shortcut around the points you made. Minecraft _was_ made by one person, and is now a team of who knows how many people for the best part of a decade. Stardew valley I think is a great example where it's an incredibly polished experience to the point that the polish level is up there with AAA games.
> and probably several of the others you’re talking about.
And you're ignoring the game of the _decade_ - a $100m follow up to one of the most loved games of all time.
> Fallout might not be ‘focused on shooting’, but it still has the look of a typical FPS game.
You mean it has a gun in it, and it's in first person? If that's your gauge for a shooter game then I don't think you're informed enough to have a discussion on this topic. A game or movie with nudity in it isn't pornographic any more than a game with a gun in it is a shooter.
> It’s as if game developers have mostly converged on a standard game design.
You're just spouting nonsense now. Here [0] is a list of the top games of this year. Only one of the top 10 is a shooter (And it's a critically acclaimed final expansion to a 7 year old game that has shown how to do a fun shooter). If you go back to 2023, you'll see the same.
> I think it is true that most money in the games industry goes into making games that heavily feature guns
"There are lies, damn lies, and statistics". Of course mnost money goes into games that heavily feature guns; because if you look at absolute spend on development and marketing costs, pretty much everything is going to be dwarfed by Call of Duty. Meanwhile you have Baldur's Gate 3 which again, is probably the best received game of the decade, Cyberpunk (one of the most expensive games made), Star Citizen (lol), Genshin Impact - all of which are _not_ based on guns (but may contain them to some extent) with mind numbing amounts of money being spent on development.
> You mean it has a gun in it, and it's in first person? If that's your gauge for a shooter game then I don't think you're informed enough to have a discussion on this topic. A game or movie with nudity in it isn't pornographic any more than a game with a gun in it is a shooter.
I am a Fallout diehard, but you and I both know combat was the worst part of those games. Imagibe how a Fallout calibre game without combat could be fun and you might start to see what I mean. All that amazing lore, story and worldbuilding and then the only activity we come up with is combat. Snooze fest.
> You mean it has a gun in it, and it's in first person?
That's not what I meant, but even if it was I think my point stands. There are too many 'first person games with guns' in general. It's hard to imagine the possibilities precisely because the market is so saturated with monotony.
> spouting nonsense
By the way, your response seems unnecessarily aggressive. Sorry if you interpreted mine as such; that wasn't the intention.
To address your list of games: it's worth observing that they all fit very neatly into categories (shooter, fighter, platformer, etc.), so I do think this shows a lack of creativity. Even within each category, there are similarities — every game seems to build on the existing idioms that have built up over the last thirty years or so, and that's without mentioning all the firearms paraphernalia and language that is standard in most big-budget games.
But the same is true of music and film and probably everything else, so it's probably just that my taste is unusual. I'm aware of that.
I actually think Minecraft was a good example of fresh game design — it didn't fit into any of those categories. Hell, it didn't even have much of an objective and it certainly didn't feel like a reskinned version of a thousand other games.
It was lighthearted, not dismissive, perhaps the same cloth. I shouldn't have specified guns I guess, combat is what I find boring, and you'll note the majority of the list of yours is violent games.
Again, not opposed just bored. I seek out non-violent games not for the lack of violence but because they have interesting mechanics. Violence/combat is the majority of top selling games, top played games. That has been true for decades.
Pacific Drive was a gem and the level of creativity I hope more studios to aim for. Another great example was Jusant. There is indeed no shortage of great indie games with what I am after. Sim games, farming/life games, factory/automation games, puzzle games are all great examples of non-combat genres with decent budgets too. But you do find there's usually just one or two big hitters, as it's a smaller market.
If you're looking for something different in AAA shooters, try Splatoon. It's basically the antithesis to classic shooter tropes and it has a whole world of art designed around it (with fictional bands, promotional art for in-game events, etc.)
this is really a short-sighted and uninformed take on what games have been successful and praised by fans over the years.
four of the most successful (perhaps iconic) games in history do not exactly meet your description in any meaningful way: baldurs gate franchise, warcraft franchise, different mmo franchises, diablo franchise.
but let's take your description and apply them to iconic fps over the years:
doom, ok shooty mc shooty goes shootin -- doomguy agrees. but theres a lot more to doom than just shooting.
cs source: nah sorry tactical strategy is not shooty mc shooty goes shootin.
quake world up to quake live/quake champions: nah sorry tactical strategy and fps-chess (duel) is not shooty mc shooty goes shootin.
halo franchise: epic sci-fi campaign story which was differentiating at the time AND tactical strategy -- while it sorta fits your description, it also sorta bucks it in the face because it was praised for its campaign as well as its online play.
overwatch: role-based tactical strategy.
battle royal genre: kinda shooty mc shootin goes shooting, but on hard mode with variance and.. tactical strategy requirement.
i mean the list goes on. reducing the surface area of FPS games historically to just some reddit meme bc it gets a lot of updoots makes me think you do not have a ton of experience playing shooters historically or otherwise (happy to be proven wrong here).
My argument is basically, if your game is so good and interesting, would it stand alone without combat? Could a different mechanic have stood in its place for a more interesting, novel game?
I have been playing FPS, guns or no guns, for 25 years. I also vehemently seek nuanced, interesting and intelligent game mechanics, and there is certainly many amazing games that fit the bill.
I am well informed, this is just my desire and not a fact or what I think should happen.
At any rate, the comments in defense so far have told me some of the most popular games are not shooters, and then that there are shooters with depth. No dispute there. I probably should have not been so pithy and stated it's combat in general, not shooters.
I also make games in my spare time, so I am at least practising what I preach. I think combat is a crutch for the gaming industry, and I would love to see more mechanics be explored with the budget a typical combat focused game gets. Gimme a AAA first person puzzle explorer ala Obduction, Pacific Drive, Viewfinder. Imagine a Fallout scale narrative exploration game that doesn't require combat to fill in the gameplay.
Cyberpunk is a fantastic story and exploration game, with interludes of stat based combat. I have spent hours just wandering the city and finding the cool hidden stories, but most 90% turn into 5 minute combat crescendos that add nothing to the story, while super obvious mechanics that would match the story go unexplored. That's more or less what annoys me, it's not a big deal I just find it a shame.
Again, I don't exactly care what other people play or do, this is just what I want.
yes, client code is JavaScript using Three.js (https://threejs.org/) library, but since server and client is decoupled, client code can be implemented using anything, there is also php cli interactive interface, but most users prefer javascript one which is currently only one with real gui
yes that is correct, all code is in this monorepo,
yeah I get little hyped with that animal destroying description :D
for that sidenote crosses - love your note - my sense of humor is kinda weird I guess or maybe because I grow up in Europe while watching America movies with football players wearing helmets idk :D
> This is low violence game
I love this description for a game that is all about shooting others in face, planting/defusing bombs and trying to survive while being shot at.
As a side-note, has the OP ever seen a football field? :) Seems to have a bunch of crosses and other out-of-place lines, but I guess the football isn't the focus so probably matters the least :)