An Ode to Arena Shooters

In the “golden age of hacking” where largely I stood idly by while my brother read 2600 and learned a bit of Russian to yell at people on Unreal Tournament; I too learned more than a good bit of Russian to yell at people on Unreal Tournament.

There’s something so absolutely satisfying about the simplicity of an arena shooter. It is a lot like racing, where it’s not just you vs yourself and your opponent(s) but also you vs the map. The map is a character in the game. Where, by whim it offers you respite and where the pressure intensifies in the same place, where every watering hole with the promise of recuperating ammunition can rapidly become a fraught battle ground - your only choice is to keep moving, keep moving, and keep moving… while you do everything else it is that you do.

Long before Doom 2016 and the new Doom Eternal, there was this slot car race called Unreal Tournament. If you put in the time to learn your place in the map, and you hit every corner and jump just right, there was a sensation that you were flying.

It felt like freedom, the kind that doesn’t come from an open road with the sky above you, but rather the kind that comes when your brain is so focused on the task at hand that you are not even aware of your body, the road you are set upon could matter no less.

I made that one!

Before I try and boot up an old PC and encounter whatever dark web hacker group still keeps UT I alive, several years ago I was hit by the same waves of nostalgia and decided to make my own arena shooter.

However, I decided to twist it just a bit to make it something more interesting to me. I had recently played Quake Champions which was an excellent and fresh reboot to Quake that I sincerely wished had stuck around, and I was very intrigued by the idea of a “1:1” mode in my shooter after playing that mode in Quake Champions.

In fact the whole shooter should have just been that. A real duel, something where you were rewarded for really knowing the depths of the map and the game, and having a plan and a strategy - that you were forced to adjust on the fly against one and only one foe.

I designed the game to have only 2 different characters. One was codenamed “JD” and the other was “BW” and after about 10 years after I put that project away I couldn’t tell you why. Each one was a different play style.

BW was very floaty and had vertical manoeuvrability. The goal of that character was to be the “artful dodger”, to embark on a war of attrition with the opponent and to outlast time.

JD was fast and had boosts from momentum. He was much weaker - until BW damaged him enough, at which point he would pick up speed seriously quickly and become both unhittable and increasingly damaging.

Also he could shoot rockets from his feet! Cool af.

There were to be 5 rounds to a game, best of 3 format. Each round would be on a different map and the maps would favour the losing player by their design and positioning.

Every time you would log on to my game and play a set, you would have to pick either BW or JD as a character, but more interestingly, if you were facing another of the same character or the opposite character, the map set would change to be tailored to that matchup.

I also had an idea for music that matched the intensity of the fights. I never got around to making that feature, but the idea was to have the BPM correspond to how fast your firing rate was so it would all line up to be an experience with tempo and rhythm that felt synchronized.

Anyway, above is the early prototype of the game, which I made in UE4. Maybe 1 day I finish it! It comes complete with good old 1337 hacker german techno music. Enjoy!