So, just about 8 years ago, you all might remember the second Mutator Contest, where people created gameplay mods without any external graphics or sounds, just scripting.
I never submitted a contest entry, but I did work on a mod during that time which I never released. I never really felt it was worthy of release. Well, I still don't, but what the hell, here it is anyway!
The mod is called Life Force. Instead of weapons and ammo... you have a staff. You can fire magical attacks that drain your health (a.k.a. Life Force) but you also regain health from your fallen enemies.
Spoiler: Screenshots!
Spoiler: Heretic Version Screenshots!I've released version 2.0, plus a heretic version! See this post for all the gory details.
Life Force 2.0: Mod | Readme
Life Force for Heretic: Mod | Readme
Old version: Mod | Readme
Some completely unimportant background
So I half-heartedly started this thing some time during the contest, and worked on and off on it for a couple weeks, then put it aside, then came by and touched it up and tweaked it here and there over the years.
Originally it just used the 'hand' sprite, and used offsets to give it an appropriate 'hurl' animation. It mainly just let you cast several different types of fireball, but over time I gave it more varied attacks, until I had 8 different weapons/spells (not counting the fist) that I was reasonably satisfied with.
Then, I got the bright idea to do something with the altfire attack. Originally I just paired up the different weapons, so whichever attack you had selected, altfire would fire an adjacent one. Then I had an even better idea... have the altfire attack be whichever attack you had selected previously. That way you can select pretty much any arbitrary combination.
Recently I got the idea to try copying and pasting some textures together to create an appropriate 'staff' sprite. (See if you can guess which ones without opening up the textures lump.) It's far from perfect (it looks more like it's held upright, rather than held out, due to the lack of texture), but I'm fairly happy with how it turned out, given the limitations inherent in a mutator script.
Well, that's where it stands now. To be honest it still feels rather overpowered to me. I'm not entirely sure whether that's because it *is*
massively overpowered, or if it juts seems that way because I've used it so much I've figured out how to exploit it to the Nth degree.
I'm still not sure if it's good, or just garbage, but I've had fun playing it, so maybe it's worth a look.