A journey through time

So to start - I am a huge old-school counterstrike fan.  I don't know how many hours of pre-1.6 counterstrike that I played with my friends, which would become my clan and life long friends. We ran our own servers, hosted servers for other clans, and in general were pretty rabid CS players. 

The fun & chaos of old-school gaming like that is what I'm aiming for with Combat Spec Ops. I've literally owned the name for YEARS (according to Godaddy I registered the domain in 2009), and there has been more than a few attempts at making a game like this over the years. 

Here's a video of one of those super early takes on the game:

As you can see, at the time it was very much a classic FPS, basically I was trying to emulate CS / BF2 / COD gameplay. This was on a custom engine that my company built at the time, right before I switched over to using Unity fulltime.

As the years passed, I became more a fan of 3rd person games - in games like Fallout or PUBG, I play in third person exclusively. A lot of this is that I feel frustrated that we spend all this time creating a custom character, only to never see anything but a gun slapped to the camera the whole game. Feels very pointless imo.

So here we are! Fast action third person shooter gameplay, classic game modes like Team Deathmatch, Free for All, Capture the Flag and more!

Which brings me to the actual topic of this update! 

New Game Modes

The first release was really just to test the multiplayer, get some early testing in on the multiplayer & shooter mechanics themselves.  The next release will have a number of additional game modes and some additional features as well!

The upcoming release will include the following game modes:

• Free for All
• Team Deathmatch
• Capture the Flag
• Bomb Disposal
• Elimination
• Conquest

These are all fairly self-explanatory to anyone that's played Counterstrike or Battlefield.  

Free for All - classic deathmatch, everyone for themselves. Highest kill count wins the round!

Team Deathmatch - team based deathmatch, highest score wins

Capture the Flag - classic CTF - 2 teams, 2 flags

Bomb Disposal - classic Counterstrike / Rainbow Siege gameplay. One team places the bomb on one of 2 sites, the other team must stop them before it explodes!

Elimination - Last man standing - 2 teams, whoever kills the other team wins!

Conquest - two teams, capture one of 3 objectives, gain tickets for capturing control points, whichever team that scores the most tickets wins!

New features

In addition to the new game modes, there are a few new features that are being added as well:

• there is an improved lobby screen so you can chat in the lobby, change map settings and the like
• There is the framework for selectable / unlockable characters
• Class customization - the original release had preset classes & weapons. You'll be able to customize your class, pick your own custom loadout! Of course this means I'll be adding a bunch of new weapons as well!

New Maps!

On top of this, I'm working through all of the maps that are listed on the home page, they are all integrated, I just need to finish configuring all of the game modes for them and  then they'll come out too!  There are 6 maps currently, with a few others in progress.

Most of the maps currently are pretty small on purpose - I like the fast action nature of the smaller maps - but particularly for modes like Conquest, I definitely want to explore larger maps ala Battlefield - possibly even with vehicles and destroyable buildings! We'll see how far I get :}

I'm hoping to have the next release out the first week of July! Stay tuned for more & thank you for checking out the game! I hope you enjoy!

Cheers

- gekido