Elimination Cooperative

A cooperative third person shooter much like Elimination Tournament. In this map, instead of fighting your human opponents, you must fight of the hordes of enemy undead units which have taken over the lands. To do so, you have an array of weapons to your disposal, as well as items. The enemy undead units will not only be mindless zombies following you around the map, but will instead also feature an elaborate artificial intelligence system.

It has been years since the idea of this map first sprouted, and I've only recently picked it back up. So far, it's going well! The AI is superhard, so I will have to tone it down a notch!

So far, about half the map is finished. The following enemies (all with their own specific AI!) are thus far appearing in the map:

Undead Enemies:
Mutant Critters:
Unaffected:

Here are some screenshots of the different development versions, so you can see the progress! Enjoy.


Credits:
- TurieL: Rifleman Elite model
- Will the Almighty: Explosion models
- Felz_09: tileset
- xXm0rpH3usXx: various models
- Teaspoon: barricade & barbwire models
- General Frank: item models
- Fingolfin: flashbang model
- olofmoleman: moria models
- InfernalTater: Stone block models
- Mc!: key item
- Nasrudin: Tree
- Pinachet diablo 3 models

Oh, this looks like fun! And I was just about to call you out on how you suddenly keep pushing others to do stuff without doing anything yourself. :P

Ani being a sissy, hehe.

hey,hey! I've just been supportive and interested in those still active! I would never push :)

And yea, ani is a sissy! Well, I think we as a team died at least 5 times to three enemy shooters, so I don't know, maybe the map is superhard :)

How long did it take you to create this?
New or not, I think you are the undisputed winner.

I'll show you! >:(

Haha :) I think I've put more hours in it now than before. However, of course I've had time to think about the map!

As always, things are timeconsuming!

Ani, do you want to take on the skeletal archers?

Since this is a cooperative game, there will be some teamplay needed. However, due to the variable number of players, there is a problem.

I would like to have some moments in the game where all players must be present. So far, I've had 3 solutions to this problem:

1) Wait until all players have entered the set area, before continuing (as in, a big button on which all players must stand)
2) Once one player enters an area (which can be closed by a door, or something) close the door and instantly set the other unit's position to inside the area
3) have a locked static camera for everyone, that follows the group. This would keep the team together at all locations, which would make teamwork a must.

There are some issues with all three solutions:
1) it seems odd to have a button that does something in a game like this. Also, waiting on the last player might be annoying.
2) one player can do all the work and the other players still get translocated to the position, as if they were doing great.
3) this will be annoying if there is a large difference in skill in the team. Also, if one player is AFK, or just superslow, the team cannot move on.

Do you guys have any other ideas? If not, which solution do you think will work best?

You could maybe do a time-limit?

So the first person triggers the event, the rest of the team has X seconds to catch up or get locked out/die/whatever.

Then if somebody doesn't make it, play the encounter balanced for the number of players that did, and the laggards can fart around in the outside world. Give them something generic to do while they wait.

That's also not a too bad option. Let's call it option 4. Thing is, you actually avoid the teamspirit with this :)

There's a common issue with option 1 and 4 as well. And that is.. you know where some teamthing will happen, prior to it happening. With option 2 and 3, there's no need for this.

I am leaning more towards option 3.. I'll do some testing to see if this gets really annoying in gameplay. Heck, it might even get Ani to stop blaming the fact that he was playing windowed mode for being so bad, because there will be no need to manually move the camera. ;)

Option 3 would really reinforce the teamplay, there's just the concern that an automatically moving camera might interfere with targeting, especially when heavily zoomed out.

One thing you could do with this sort of camera that might allow a slightly more zoomed-in view (but still more zoomed out than the current view) would be to make aggro'd monsters also be considered in the camera position calculation, only make them count a bit less than players to avoid large waves completely centering the camera on themselves. You could even make each additional monster count less in order to keep the effect significant with just a few monsters. Or you could group enemies and consider the group as a single enemy, that way as players gun the group down the camera offset remains unaffected until the whole group is dead.

That could work, indeed.

I was thinking to have preset camera angle / zoom regions through which the team moves. This would kinda give the same idea, except that it should all be preset manually. Which could make me bored rather quickly, so maybe I'll first try your idea :)

If you need someone to test with, you know where to find me. :)

I really like the terrain! Looks beautiful :3

Thank you! It's very difficult to create playable terrain that is both functional and beautiful.

The thing with elimination's dynamics is that it requires flat terrain as much as possible because it is very difficult to determine the z-axis from the birds-eye point of view that is the default wc3 camera. Once the z-axis comes into play it gets frustrating to throw grenades, because they bounce of the terrain in a way which you would not expect to happen.

So I'm glad that this flat terrain is still visually appealing :)

Yes, it has been quiet here.
No, I have not been doing nothing!

I've added some more screenies to the first post. I've completed about 10 enemy units with 5 distinct AI behaviours. Complete with a set camera, this map is getting pretty teamwork-needed already!

Do you guys have any ideas/wishes that should be in this map? Could be anything! Let me know