April 19th, 2023 Posted in Creativity, Game development
Atoll: My first map for Operation: Harsh Doorstop in Unreal 4
There’s a first person shooter called Operation: Harsh Doorstop that recently released on Steam for free. The studio boss is a YouTuber called BlueDrake42 and he’s absolutely sick of the games industry, so created his own game funded by Patreon. It’s still very early days but shows great promise as it’s based on Unreal Engine and openly moddable to encourage us to add, change and extend the base game.
The New Milsim Engine?
Arma is still going ten years after launch as it works in a similar way and I reckon O:HD could overtake Arma as the engine of choice for milsim style play if there’s enough support and some key mods are added like the gamemaster (Zeus), inventory, vehicles and more detailed medical system. All of those things are in development right now and things are moving fast as we can use Unreal Marketplace assets instead of fighting proprietary code and systems and making everything from scratch.
My First Map: Atoll
Anyway, I made a map for O:HD inspired by Far Cry 3 and Wake Island called Atoll. It’s super simple and we’re fighting over a strategic communication tower. Initial response is good and if people want more I could add more islands, an airbase, docks and maybe even procedural seagulls/fish.The modding folks on the O:HD Discord were amazing in helping me get up to speed with the editor and O:HD assets.
I learned a ton of stuff while making this including terrain basics, adding custom 3D models and using a marketplace asset for the sea/waves. I’m now researching building construction, terrain generation tools and smart landscape materials to make a bigger scale map!