In 2018, we got together with an idea to make a spiritual successor to Blood. At first, the idea was nothing more than a simple Blood knockoff but over time we developed our world, characters and gameplay into something unique. Since then, we have worked hard planning and learning, trying to make sure that this game will be special and now all that work is coming to fruition...

Welcome to GORE. The next great Boomer Shooter!

January 2023 marks the first time in this projects history that we've felt ready to share what we've created. Things are finally moving forward at a rate we're happy with and we believe that 2023 will be the year of GORE. In this first devlog, myself (Kane Reeve) and my creative partner (Caleb Ralph) will go over what we've been working on and what we plan on working on in the future. We plan on releasing a devlog at the start of each month. If there's ever any issues with this release schedule, we will inform you all via our social medias.
Twitter - @SPILLSOMEGORE
Facebook - GOREFB
Discord coming soon...

Devlog video version - COMING SOON

Now that these introductions are out of the way, let's get into the devlog...

Kane Reeve (SmokeyReeve) - 

I'm Kane Reeve, I am a the lead developer/designer/artist/writer for the project. I've been working on games since 2009, starting with Game Maker 7. Me and Caleb met during this time all from a shared interest in making games and the game Blood. 

We are planning on releasing GORE episodically, so i've spent a lot of my time working on the plan for Episode 1 and figuring out the games overarching story. That's not to say this game is going to be extremely story and cutscene heavy, in fact our plan for cutscenes right now is just one for the beginning and end of each episode. I do want to make sure the world is fleshed out however, and I want character motivations to make sense. That's all I want to say regarding the story for now though, No spoilers allowed here!

The Sheriff:

Something I can talk about however is our games """Hero""" (massive quotations required). You play as The Sheriff. An undead Sheriff who in the middle of the 1800s was murdered alongside his deputy and town by a cult seeking world domination and immortality. The cult sought to murder people of interest in ways that would allow them to use them as undead slaves, however for The Sheriff, something went very very wrong. He came back driven mad by his time in limbo, and with free will... Making him a living nightmare.

Pretty boy

We take great pride in the fact our games protagonist is just gross. He drools, he eats people, he's a zombie. He's NOT a good guy, he's just an undead maniac who lusts for GORE. So spill some!

Artstyle:

In addition to developing the games story, world and main character, I have also been working on developing the games artstyle. From the start we knew we wanted the game to be 2.5d due to the games that inspired it, however we were undecided on the how's.
How were we gonna make the weapon sprites?
How would we make the character sprites?
How would we create the 3d elements?
How would we create the levels?
Initially we were going to digitise real world items to make the sprites, similar to DOOM. However we soon realised this would limit our creativity massively, and be difficult for us to pull off. 

So, after some experimentation we came to the conclusion that the best thing for us to do was to create 3d models in blender then turn them into sprites. 

This worked out exactly as we hoped and allowed me to create sprites with animations quickly and easily! This also meant we weren't limited to whatever we could find in real life for our games weapons, allowing us to create unique designs. 

This revolver was designed to be break action.

Inspired by build engine, we wanted something extra however... In many build engine games, Voxels are used to great effect to supplement the 2d art with 3d objects. We wanted this too and toyed with the idea of introducing voxels into our game too! However, after much experimentation and deliberation, we ended up deciding to instead try something that we haven't seen before in a game of this style. Rather than using Voxels, we instead decided to use low-poly models with a PSX shader. 

This started as just an experiment but we ended up really enjoying the way it looked! We believe that this stylistic choice is one of the many things that sets us apart from our peers and I cant wait til we have more to show off!

Lastly, I worked a bit on creating some FX out of stock-footage. 

That's it from me! I'm now gonna pass the reins to Caleb so he can let you know what he's been up to! 

Caleb Ralph (Werewolfware) - 

My name is Caleb Ralph, I am super excited to work with Kane Reeve on the GORE project.

GORE is a passion project we have been determined to make for some time now. Like Kane, I got my start making games in Game Maker. Back in 2009 we discovered each other's collections of gory 2D shooter games on the web.We started talking online about how we liked each others games.

He revealed to me that he was a fan of Blood, one of my all time favorite games.

Ever since then we would keep in touch through email. We wanted to make a game like Blood.

In the meantime I would learn about other game engines and programming languages. In particular I was introduced to the 3D world of game development with Unity around 2014. I learned the ins and outs of the engine, and I learned the C# programming language.

The idea for GORE first came around in 2017, when Kane suggested the idea in a discord call. We decided that we would make the game in the Unity engine. During this time a few Unity projects were created for GORE here and there, but were eventually scrapped. Ideas for GORE were tossed around for a few years, but school and work took up most of

Fast forward to October 2021...

Jon St. John makes an unexpected appearance amongst the @SPILLSOMEGORE twitter followers.

Dev leads shit their pants.

>> 2022 - The real work starts <<

PLAYER CONTROLLER

The player movement needs to feel precise and arcade-like. I spent a lot of time researching the appropriate ways to handle player mechanics.

I ended up writing a Player Controller script that uses the Unity CharacterController component and some movement functions based on the Quake 3 source code.

Running / Jumping:

A lot of values were tweaked to get the desired feel, however there's still more testing that needs to be done. Here is a preview of basic movement / jumping:

As a result of the Quake-like movement code, the player can actually do a "b-hop" of sorts and gain velocity in the air, though this is able to be limited via the script so the result is subtle:

Editor note (Kane): This feels amazing to play!

Additional Player Movement side note:

Currently the physics done by PlayerController is being applied using a CharacterController. I would prefer to somehow engineer it to use a Box Collider in the future.

Swimming:

A WIP swimming functionality has been integrated into the player controller has well. The player is tagged as "swimming" when it comes into contact with a tagged water plane. The player's movement is altered while underwater.

Preview:

Feels pretty nice so far, but still needs some fixing.

Crouch / Crawl:

Crouch and crawling behavior is pretty straight-forward: You hold the crouch key (Left Control or C) and you crouch, release crouch key to stand back up. Your movement speed is clamped while crouched. If you are crouched and there is a collider blocking your head when you release the crouch key, the player remains crouched until the collider has space.

Weapon:

The gun model currently uses procedural animations to create a dynamic bob / swaying motion as the player camera moves and rotates. This will be expanded upon further for jumping / landing effects etc.

The weapon script has a customizable fire rate and weapon spread. Only 1 gun is currently implemented, but a weapon switch system is on the way.

The gun shoots by using raycasts. Each successful raycast hit will create a bullet hole and a simple bullet hole particle that can be swapped in the inspector.

Note: The 3D rifle model is for testing purposes only, as the game will use only 2D sprites. These 2D sprites should behave accordingly with the procedural system.

Door / Use System:

The double-door script contains the actual door-opening logic specific to the door. It also gets marked globally as Useable, which tells the Use System it is able to be interacted with. The Use System also shows a item-specific label when it is able to be interacted with.

Preview of double-door interaction:

When leaving a door opened, the door automatically closes after a delay:

That about concludes my section for this dev log. I am very excited to continue working on GORE!

Conclusion

Work on GORE in the last few months has progressed at an amazing pace. A pace which we have every intention of sticking to in the future! This devlog represents the first time in 4 years we've felt comfortable sharing our ideas publicly. This is huge for us! 

We hope that through this we have given you an idea of what this project is and have gotten you excited for its future! We sure are!

Check out our links at the top of this post for more contact and methods of chatting with us. I'm gonna be active on all social medias linked happy to answer any questions regarding the game, as long as the answer isn't a spoiler. You may also see exclusive work in progress previews, but keep that one a secret yeah?

If you wish to contact us directly for enquiries regarding GORE, you can reach us at - [email protected]

See you in February's devlog where we'll shoot at least 5 fish. 

Have a good one!

Itch - https://smokeyreeve.itch.io/gore
ModDB - https://www.moddb.com/games/gore
Steam - COMING SOON