This is a project I've been working on since 2019 now on and off (mostly off), but lately have been getting a lot more serious about it. It's working toward becoming a fully standalone game built on the zdoom engine, with fully original assets and a modified executable with some engine tweaks.
Where do I even start... ok first, here, have some of my precious monsters (you can see video of them in my first reply to this thread!
)
Also, at the end of the post are links to notable posts that I have made showing or describing things
Let me try and break this into key points. I'll try to keep it reasonably concise, and then figure out where to put in details later... or something.
-The setting
OKS* is set in a universe inspired by 19th century and early 20th century science fiction, located on the Earth's moon during an invasion of an extradimensional military force bent on conquest and domination. Keeping with the inspiration, the moon is a jungle world with strange plants and animals surrounding the various settlements and structures established during the ongoing rush for space, after the discovery of aetheric propulsion some decades prior. The player takes the role of the largest lunar city's chief of security who stayed behind during the evacuations, and now is determined to bring the fight back to the invaders however he can.
(*"OKS" has some meaning that may or may not manifest itself in the final name, we'll see)
Alongside the aforementioned early science fiction, I am also drawing inspiration and influence from various pieces of art and music that fit a similar dark surrealist niche to the aesthetic I have in mind... for kicks here's a quick imgur album of a small number of examples.
-The game itself
As could be expected I am going for the (increasingly popular I guess?) mid-90s FPS vibe, just doing it as well as I can manage with my own ideas. It's not intended to feel just like Doom, rather I am bringing inspiration for feel in from many games as well as just my own preferences, especially build engine as well. I think I have already maxed out my ambition capacitor, so I think it's probably for the best that I am not trying to reinvent the wheel here. There are some notable gameplay tweaks here, though, such as reloading on some weapons, jumping, crouching, etc. And I am trying to give the enemies a good amount of variety in terms of attacks and behavior.
I currently have info drafted up for 8-ish weapons and 13-ish monsters, of which 1 weapon and 5 monsters are more or less "impression-complete", which is to say they are generally fairly close to their final experience, even if details will probably change along the way. Weapons have been going a lot slower than monsters... I don't have the workflow down for them quite yet. I will do something to feature and describe these drafts and creations over time as I figure out how I really want to structure this thread. Bear with me if you don't mind.
For levels, my overall goal is to have 3 episodes of perhaps 7 maps each, but I am keeping it small to start - one conceptual-demonstration level for episode 1 that "gets the point across", and then we'll go from there.
Here's a cleaner picture of the assorted enemies so far. Note that not all of them use the same object scale in-game since the sprites start getting a little too big. I am using a larger player and larger sprites than used in classic doom so as to increase the apparent pixel density of both the world and objects.
And here's a frame of the most complete weapon right now, the creatively named "MG":
-Development
I'm trying to keep this feeling reasonably authentic for the 1994-1996 era, based on what was possible in both doom engine and build engine games... I want it to feel like it could plausibly be a source port from some obscure FPS game from that period. This so far has mainly been manifested in trying to get the monster sprites to feel somewhat like stop motion miniatures (partly because I really like that look, and partly because I have neither the artistic ability nor the patience to make every frame and angle from scratch
) and the weapons looking like they could have once been physical models posed and photographed. 
I'm doing that part in blender with a lot of trial and error with shaders to get something that has the right feel and texture I want... I think I've gotten a workflow I'm pretty happy with, although weapons are proving a lot harder to get worked out, which is why I only have one actually presentable right now. If I could actually do stop motion models for all this, I totally would... but I would like to be finished this decade. I'm allowing myself certain advanced features such as slopes. I am considering colored sectors as well, but that can be kind of a rabbit hole.
To clarify on the line earlier about the progress on monsters and weapons - I currently have 1 weapon more or less fully implemented in game, 1 partially in-game (but needs sprite rework), 2 others modeled, and 1 more modeled and previously prototyped that I am not sure I will keep. For the monsters, I have 5 fully functional with 1 of those probably getting remodeled in the future, all still needing some sprite cleanup and things like added blood on death anims, etc. Then there is one more that is modeled but really needs to be redone, as it was one of the first I did and the rig sucks and I can do a lot better now...
Uhh, what else. I haven't really done any level design worth mentioning yet - I did spend a while last year playing with textures and layouts, but I didn't have the enemy roster that I do now, so it wasn't very productive. The textures weren't very good either, so in general it turned out pretty poorly... I think I might be on a better track now - building out the toolkit before actually delving into putting it to use. Thankfully I don't need to make all the weapons and monsters to start doing that, just the smaller subset that lives in E1...
Internally, this is almost all done in ZScript, but recently I have taken the plunge into modifying engine source to achieve some features that I want or tweak things that I want to do differently that would otherwise require extensive workarounds to accomplish. So... this won't be an IWAD you can just drop into an existing gzdoom installation. Maybe someday I'd make a compatibility version, but it's way too early to say.
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I guess this post is getting pretty long now, so I should wrap things up. Although I thought I'd have even more to say with how long I've been working on this... oh well. There's a number of dead ends to cover at some point, I guess. And hopefully soon I will make a little video to showcase a few things that are working in game, mainly the various enemy behaviors and giving an idea what the sprites look like in motion from multiple angles.
Ok, I will get out of your hair for now. Thank you for reading.
I hope I can pull this off.
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Sept 7 edit - I will post links to notable posts here!
- Big renders of monsters and weapons (sept 7)
- Flare gun & fire extravaganza (video) (sept 14)
- Talking about environment design and inspiration, followed shortly by dynamite (sept 18-21)
- First peek of the SMG (oct 1)
- MONSTROLOGY pt 1 (first batch of monster lore) (oct 4)
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Here's a quick list of every video so far! (Not embedded, I don't wanna explode anyone's browser)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSzRn0Md_ko - Monster demo 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMNjZUFevh8 - Sector accel demo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6t2tWtNO7kU - MG demo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFlq7_oQS54 - Monsters avoiding damaging floors
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGnt7ZGBl4w - Flare gun and fire showcase
