Multiplayer games usually do not end up being played the way the developers intended. Developers create the rules, but players spend far more time exploring those rules than the developers ever could. Over time, players discover the meta, and that meta becomes the real way the game is played.
Items, armor, and powerups are an example of this. Quake 1 singleplayer had armor, and Quake 3 multiplayer kept armor and pickups, most likely because they were already familiar parts of the genre. Removing them probably would have felt strange at the time.
In CPMA, which is a Quake 3 mod that also has items, controlling armor and pickups developed into the meta of how to duel. The original decision to add armor to Quake 1 was probably not made with the expectation that, years later, duel would revolve around timing, routing, and denying those resources.
Specifically, it turned into the meta because the player who knows the timings, locations, and routes can keep arriving to fights with a health or damage advantage. In CPMA, whoever owns and cycles the armor and items will probably win, even if they are mechanically worse than the other player.
For me, and for other people I have talked to, that style of gameplay is not really fun until you are fighting someone very close to your skill level. Otherwise, the gameplay becomes lopsided, when a player is able to continuously leverge this advantage then ever single encounter becomes one where one player is at a severe disadvantage health and damage wise, causing a series of spawn camp style kills on the enemy.
Another example of emergent gameplay is competitive 6s in Team Fortress 2. TF2 was built with many classes, weapons, and public-servers, but competitive players eventually developed a specific format and class structure that became the main competitive way to play.
Initially, Frag-Z will not use powerups, items, or pickups in the core game modes.
I am specifically choosing not to put items in at the start because I believe the gameplay will evolve into something better than what CPMA evolved into if we do not have them. I do not want the huge differential that can be created just by items on the map. I want Frag-Z to lean more on mechanical skill, movement, and map knowledge, rather than being able to obtain an arbitrary advantage by being in the right place at the right time and creating a huge snowball effect.
We will see how gameplay develops. I am not afraid of experimenting with items or pickups, and they may exist in other game modes, but because of the reasons above, I will be careful with them.
Frag-Z does share similarities with games like Quake 3 Arena and CPMA, but the main difference is that there is an active developer working on the game who cares about making something that can supersede those games.
I do not just have a vision for a game. I actually play games and know what people enjoy. I want to create things that push the skill ceiling even higher than before, while also fixing problems that I know exist in games that can no longer really be changed.
Right now, in all game modes, you are fixed to the following weapons: rocket launcher, grenade launcher, shotgun, sniper rifle, lightning gun, and knife.
The reason for this is that these weapons provide six different types of interaction and mouse usage. Rockets exercise prediction of an enemy's movement, plus linear prediction of a projectile. Grenades provide a similar idea to rockets, but add gravity prediction on the projectile. Shotgun provides close-range flicking onto enemies. Sniper rifle is for long-range precise mouse movements. Lightning gun is for tracking. Knife is for predicting the look direction of the enemy.
These six weapons cover a lot of the enjoyable prediction techniques in FPS games, and in my eyes they should be enough for most situations. That said, as someone who enjoys playing TF2, I understand that having different weapon choices can be interesting. If there were different weapons, they would likely live inside each of the six aiming categories. For example, there might be a grenade launcher that could heal teammates on direct hit and deal damage to enemies on direct hit, but would do less damage.
I am not opposed to having different weapons in the different aiming and prediction categories, but initially the six main weapons will be balanced before I start thinking about adding different weapons.
The game will probably not have classes. As mentioned above, there may eventually be different loadouts.
In games like Overwatch, you can press a button to do a crazy thing. In Frag-Z, we do not really want that. Crazy things should be hard to do.
There are images and videos of the game in its textureless form. The textureless form is how I test gameplay and debug things without any visual distractions. Textureless rendering also provides good performance on weaker computers. I care more about having a game that can run at a high refresh rate than a game that looks good.
I have shown that the game can run well in textureless mode, and I am starting to work on higher-fidelity graphics. At the same time, I do not want to give that to players yet. The reason is that people will comment on it and try to give feedback when I am not ready for graphical feedback yet. Right now I am trying to simply have really good gameplay, and then graphics will be a bonus layer on top of that.
I am not against good graphics. In fact, I do want to have a graphical style that is unique to Frag-Z, but it is simply not time for that yet. On the other hand, there is enough infrastructure in place to allow users to start authoring maps that use PBR materials and related features. Please read the Map Making page for more information.
This is a hard one. Many multiplayer games are handled by huge teams that have the resources to support tons of players on their servers. Meanwhile, Frag-Z just has me.
My goal is eventually to allow tons of people to play the game, but it cannot be a huge influx overnight. I want to grow the infrastructure as needed. Right now, for example, there are 0 people who play Frag-Z because I have not provided a link to the client or a running dedicated server yet.
That is going to change soon. I will start running more gametests with people once it is easier to have them join through a download link on this site. That should eventually turn into a weekly meetup where people play a team-based game mode, which can turn into daily players doing things, which leads to me hosting more servers and growing it naturally instead of saying, "okay, the game is ready, everyone come play."
At the start every player who decided to try the game is important, and I personally believe that building a playerbase player by player is important at the start of the multiplayer journey.
Please visit the Game Modes page to see what we currently support.
In terms of other game modes, I am open to adding more. The next one will be Skill Duel, where points are scored for doing cool stuff. There will also be a tactical mode, where the movement is more realistic and weapons are similar to Call Of Duty. Before getting to the more complicated modes, I want to nail down the core game modes that will help dial in movement, weapon damage, and the rest of the foundation.
I am working on Frag-Z as a solo developer. I am taking on the responsibility of creating the code, infrastructure, website, 3D assets, maps, and the rest of the game.
At the end of the day, I want to create absolutely everything from scratch for this game, including audio and so on. I do not know how to do everything yet. I can do 3D modeling, map creation, and programming, but I still need to learn more about audio and procedural materials. For the things I do not fully understand yet, I will use content created by others, and replace it with my own creation later when I know how to do it.
The main things I did not create myself right now are the PBR materials used on the weapons, ambient sound, foley sound, and skyboxes. Aside from those current exceptions, Frag-Z is created by me.