DUSK - an actually-authentic retro shooter wtf

[Matt]

the enemies appear to be rednecks, Klan members and fundamentalist churchy types, so.......

[cambertian]

I love the Matrix-like moves, and the overall theme. And, it looks like a lot of fun.

My personal preference, however, veers away from low-resolution graphics & blocky models. I realize this game is deliberately attempting to look like a 1990's shooter, but I think the developers could have cleaned up the models. On the plus side, the game-play looks like it's a blast.

That's the main problem I'm encountering too: nostalgia makes things look better, sound better, etc. than they actually are. New games that try to harness nostalgia should aim to do everything bigger, better, and stronger than past limitations, IMO. It's what separates "retro" from "dated".

Good video on the subject:

[ReX]

Good video on the subject:

Indeed, a well-produced commentary. [Although, in a couple of places he references "Yacht Club" instead of "Shovel Knight".]

As for DUSK, and the nostalgia it is intended to evoke, I don't doubt that it will appeal to many people. For me, however, nostalgia alone will probably not justify the economics.

[Kinsie]

The one-level DUSK demo got sent out to Youtubers and also I guess a bunch of people in their Steam chat who asked nicely. TerminusEst13 recorded a commentary-less playthrough, if you want to see it without Youtubers hooting over it.



Be warned, there's a bug around 10:50 where you might wanna turn down your sound for a little bit. Just sayin'.

[Tapwave]

Aww, I expected crisp, delicious 11025hz sounds!
Bit odd they have an use key, though, but I guess that with the "you can pick up objects" spiel, they pretty much need it.

[Ryan Cordell]

Definitely looking better now than it used to, so there's that fear brushed away.

[NeuralStunner]

The one-level DUSK demo got sent out to Youtubers and also I guess a bunch of people in their Steam chat who asked nicely.

I hope Dusk is one of them, for reasons.

[Matt]

that is definitely looking better than the other previews I've seen!

[LkMax]

The one-level DUSK demo got sent out to Youtubers and also I guess a bunch of people in their Steam chat who asked nicely. TerminusEst13 recorded a commentary-less playthrough, if you want to see it without Youtubers hooting over it.

Be warned, there's a bug around 10:50 where you might wanna turn down your sound for a little bit. Just sayin'.

Game looks fun, shame about the early-3d graphics.
Also, you left the sink running, you monster.

[Project Shadowcat]

I'm getting a strong Blood vibe now that I have seen Terminus's video. Actually looking pretty cool.

[Kinsie]

I played this myself today at PAX Aus. I've been sceptical about it until I was hands-on-keyboard. The movement feels right. You move like a freight train that can do sick baseball slides for dramatic effect.

[The Zombie Killer]

I've also had the chance to play it (via Steam), and while I was very skeptical when I first saw the trailer, it certainly is very fun.
The movement feels really smooth, and while I wouldn't call the game perfect just yet, such an outcome is well within reach.

tl;dr it's good, I'm excited

[Xaser]

Also got a Steam preview recently. It's as good as I remembered, so bias confirmed.

I may post up some videos of random goofing about at some point. Doing flips is great.

[Ma77]

So DUSK has enabled preorder & for $20 they give you a "shareware" of the 1st episode. It took me 3 hours to beat it & i found the secret level. The levels are really detailed & somewhat long for a game like this The movement fells fantastic & buttery smooth, strafe jumping is amazing & fast. Weapons are fun & creative, Enemies are fair & best part of all NO HITSCAN ENEMIES . I cant wait for the rest of the game.

[phantombeta]

Just for the record, while Unity is certainly a lot more capable than many people make it out to be, it's not without issues that make it an absolute no as an engine choice for any of my projects.

For me, it's the tight-wrapped data packaging system. I like games where you can repalce resources via directory structure, or at least using an open format. (I oh-so-badly wanted to replace some sounds in Ziggurat, but it would require unpacking the data, editing, and repacking as a replacement. Ugh. I shouldn't have to modify core files to mod, this isn't the 90s any more.)


Also: It's very disturbing how many posters here are not taking Xaser's optimism seriously. :(

Heh, I was actually PM'd about my issues with Unity by someone who wanted some info since they were going to be using Unity soon (I'll leave out names), and that was actually one of my very first points.

• Pretty much everything is done in a GUI, if you're used to ZDoom-styled development, you'll be like a fish out of water. This can also negatively affect development, since devs will get into the habit of only testing their game in the Unity editor, which leads to bugs like the mouse not being captured properly after alt-tabbing (this is present in pretty much every Unity game I've played)
• You can only script in UnityScript (a customized version of JavaScript) and a VERY outdated version of C#. This has performance implications a lot of the time, you can do native code via [DllImport] in C#, but it's painful
• External resources such as models are not a built-in feature, and unless you put in the work to write a skeletal mesh importer, you're screwed if you want any serious mod support in your game
• It's closed-source, which gives you less control over what you can do. My personal "golden rule" is to only develop in an engine I have the source code for. You can obtain the source code for Unity, but it's only given out under very specific circumstances.
• Unity doesn't really offer much in the way of networking, if you want any serious multiplayer in your game, you're going to need to write the majority of it from scratch, if not all of it
• Unity uses a VERY outdated version of Mono for its scripting runtime, which is the reason it uses an old version of C#. They often claim over the years that they're going to "update it eventually", but it still hasn't happened
• With how Unity encourages you to structure your games, it is very easy for your project and its resources to get incredibly disorganized. If you look through the source code of a Unity game in ILSpy for example, you'll notice that more often than not, the code is an absolute mess of scripts that usually don't need to be there
• Because the version of Mono used is outdated, you'll experience a lot of performance issues related to garbage collection, this makes optimizing your game quite a painful procedure

While I'm really, REALLY late, one thing to add to that list is that Unity seems to use an absurd amount of RAM.
Pretty much all Unity games I've played start out using at least 1 GB of RAM, even ones that shouldn't need that much. Usually the RAM usage actually lowers after the game starts actually loading and stuff, but even then it only drops to around 500 MB. (Although in most Unity games I've played the RAM usage got back to >700 MB after they finished loading...)
I find this pretty annoying, myself. I'm also pretty damn sure it's a problem with the engine itself, as literally every Unity game I've ever played does this.

(I wish I hadn't been gone from here for I think all of 2016 :\)