Red Flags : Open The Line

[Pomegranate26]

Hi everyone,

I wanted to introduce a Total Conversion I have been developing called **Red Flags**.

It is a full single-player project built with GZDoom, with its own campaign, weapons, enemies, bosses, interface, visual identity and progression. The aim is not to create a conventional Doom map pack, but something closer to a standalone retro FPS built on top of the engine.

Red Flags takes place in a collapsing and increasingly unreal version of the Western world. The campaign moves through industrial zones, abandoned infrastructure, military facilities, damaged urban areas and more surreal spaces that become harder to interpret as the game progresses. The story is not delivered through long cutscenes or large amounts of exposition. South Of The Border 9South Carolina) plays an important part in the game. Most of it is communicated through the environments, the order in which places are discovered and the general feeling that the world has already passed the point where it could be repaired.

The gameplay is deliberately rooted in classic shooters. Movement is fast, combat is direct and the player is expected to manage ammunition, positioning and weapon choice rather than character statistics or crafting systems. There are no RPG mechanics, random loot systems or procedural levels. Every map, encounter and enemy placement is designed by hand.

The current campaign contains twenty-one maps, including a secret route, with eight weapons, twelve enemy types and eight bosses. The game also has its own HUD, menus, pickups, effects and progression systems. Windows and Linux builds already exist, and the campaign can currently be played from beginning to end.

A great deal of the work has also gone into the less visible side of development. The project uses automated validation and regression testing to catch broken maps, scripting problems and gameplay issues before they spread through the campaign. At the moment, more than two thousand six hundred tests are passing, and all twenty-one maps have been validated successfully.

The project is now close to release-candidate status, although I do not consider it finished yet. The main remaining work concerns visual polish, weapon presentation, enemy readability, animation, level-flow adjustments and the final artistic pass. The game is technically close to complete, but technical completion and a convincing final atmosphere are not the same thing, as anyone who has spent months staring at unfinished sprites eventually learns.

The main influences are Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, Blood, Unreal and the large Total Conversions of the late 1990s and early 2000s. I want Red Flags to feel like an obscure commercial shooter from that period, something that could have existed in 1998 but arrived damaged, politically feverish and slightly out of time.

One important choice was to keep the game fully authored and deterministic. Red Flags does not use generative AI, dynamic narrative systems or LLM-driven gameplay. Every level, combat encounter and progression event is controlled by traditional game logic. This matters for balancing, reproducibility, speedrunning and long-term maintenance.

GZDoom was the obvious engine for the project because it still offers an exceptional balance between modern flexibility and classic FPS responsiveness. The work done by the engine developers and the wider community has made projects of this scale possible without losing the immediacy that makes Doom-derived games so effective.

I will post screenshots, gameplay footage and more detailed development updates as the final visual overhaul progresses. Feedback from experienced GZDoom developers and players will be especially useful, particularly regarding combat pacing, weapon feel, level readability and overall presentation.

Thanks for reading.

[chronoteeth]

Screenshots please.

[Enjay]

Yes, please check the rules for posting information about a project.

viewtopic.php?f=19&t=13893

I'll leave the thread open for a few days to give you a chance to add the required information/pics.