1995:
The idea started back in 1995. Me and a friend (who I will call hitman213 in this thing, don't want to say his real name here) were walking down the street, going home from high school. We both loved FPS games. We both played Doom, Heretic, Rise of the Triad, Wolf3d, and some other FPS games that are not well known, such as zero tolerance for the Sega Saturn. I just had gotten him into this badass game I got as a demo on PC gamer, called Terminator : Future Shock. It was a a post apocalyptic shooter where you fight terminators and other robots on foot, in vehicles and more.
He turned to me and said, let's create our own game!
I told him game design is something that's really hard to do, and even though we had both taken programming courses in high school, (I had taken Basic, so had he), I knew game design for that kind of game was way ahead of what we were doing. I told him it takes a full design team of people to make a game. He thought "lets bring our idea to a gaming company"... I then told him, "I'm not sure they would accept our idea..." But he convinced me.
vicious onslaught was born..... But back then it was being called breakpoint. He named it after the movie point break (which sucks)... He was looking for a new name. I didn't give him one till much later in 1997.
So we went home and sketched out ideas for weapons and monsters first. I no longer have these sketches but they were good. He had taken drawing courses and he was a natural, unlike me. He drew our main character, a metal head mercenary which had no name. He then drew enemy soldiers and a flamethrower and an iconic weapon idea, that got unfortunately cut, the spiked yoyo...
I then thought up several "visions" of what the game would be like. Some of these predate the sketches. I was inspired by ROTT mostly, not doom, weirdly. I wanted people fighting soldiers of some kind, and I knew our character was going to be a soldier. Weapon ideas came in as well, such as the triple chaingun idea and some others. I thought of ideas where the game would take place. Military bases. You had to stop some kind of enemy menace... The whole look I thought up was unique, foggy skies, bases, enemies, flying heads with elongated mouths as enemies and soldiers and tanks as well... This concept was the original concept for the game. It was partially ditched later. The setting would be changed, but the other ideas were kept.
Then he thought of a very cool weapon idea, the dual rocket launcher backpack. It fired multiple missiles at your enemy in a quick succession... Not slow. Similar to the devastator but the only difference is that if fired full scale missiles, not mini missiles. By that point I had shown him terminator future shock and I liked it.
Around then, Hitman213 thought of the story idea that was his. In his story, a madman with resurrecting power starts resurrecting evil people in history to bring on Armageddon. People like Napoleon, Hitler, Genghis Khan, etc... I didn't like that idea. Because it involved fighting Nazi's as enemies and I didn't want this to be a wolf3d ripoff. So I told him the idea was not that interesting and I then told him a competing idea, which became the story of the game. It took some convincing to get him to let go of his original story but it wasn't very interesting, to me at least. As co-developer of a game, I had to have some kind of say, right?
My story was different. A mad cult "awakens" in the far future and takes over the government and armies worldwide, and uses them to nuke cities. They nuke Paris and Washington DC, and start bombing others. The end times come. Your character is a cyborg and is the only one that can stop them... Before each attack, a dark hooded figure only known as the Dark One emerges on TV and proclaims the end times, then a nuke bombing happens a day later. Then later on, mutations, horrible experiments gone wrong made in cult experimentation chambers in their secret bases, are unleashed on survivors to kill them. You would be fighting such mutations and cult soldiers, patrolling the cities looking for survivors as well..
Then came the final decisions to what our player character would be. I wanted him to be a cyborg and a metalhead. Hitman213 wanted him to be an anti-hero... We decided to make him both... A Cyborg Mercenary... Then I thought of the idea that made it even better.... I decided that I wanted our character to be a Cyborg Mercenary that listened to Metal Music. We were both metalheads (and still are) so the idea stuck with us. Why not make him a badass cyborg metalhead mercenary who kicks total ass?
By now our character had a name...... Bastard! The name was something I thought up for the good guys in the story. It would be an organization named: "Boston Army of Secret Troopers and Royal Defenses"... Stupid name but it spelt out bastard. Once Hitman213 heard that name, He suggested we call our character bastard and change the name for the good guys. I thought up "american social services", and then He changed it to "Anti-Social Services", named after the Anthrax song Anti social. Our character and our good guys were born...
1996:
I told Hitman213 my idea for the dark one. He gave him a name... "Dr Choppa Schlonghoff!"... It was hilariously bad for a name. He was going to be a mad doctor type character... We never fleshed him out other than chopping off schlongs was his purpose in life. This idea was horrible... But we stuck with it for a few years, at least...
We then thought up weapon, item, and enemy ideas. Weapon ideas were split down the middle. Him doing some, me doing some. He thought up the really ambitious, controversial ones... I thought up the ones that were more standard, but a few of mine are really unique. The first few I thought up were not so original. Assault Rifle, Laser Pistol and Laser Rifle, Bazooka, Plasma Rifle, Grenades, etc. He then came up with much cooler ideas, including the before mentioned Dual Rocket Launcher Backpack, Napalm Cannon (an explosive incendiary shooting gun), Cattle Prod, Molotov Cocktail, Terminator 2 inspired Shotgun (complete with the lever action loading system), Turd Bomb and the Skewer (a weapon that shoots a dart that impales enemies and allows you to disembowel them) and Nail Bombs.
a painting program)
I soon followed suit with more original ideas. Spiked Fists like wolverine uses in x-men, triple chaingun, enema launcher (we both came up with this idea simultaneously), Spread Rifle, Det Packs, Black Hole Gun, Triple Grenade Launcher, and Cluster Grenades...
Around then, ideas for the game's environments started to change. Almost totally gone from the picture were the ideas of the game taking place in military bases. Post Apocalyptic cityscapes took over... This was heavily inspired by Terminator : Future shock, which takes place in a post apocalyptic LA. You would be fighting the CSC cult in ruins of cities, and would be using tons of vehicles to drive around. You had walking, driving, and flying missions just like in Future Shock. Vehicle ideas would be the next thing to get fleshed out. Cars, Jeeps, Flying Surfboards/Hoverboards, Mac Trucks, Jetpacks, Motorcycles, Exoskeleton mechs to fight in, and even a Harrier Jet. Later on Blimps, Submarines, and others were added. The exoskeleton idea started as a generic mech but later on got changed a lot. You would be able to "recreate" weapons you had on foot in the exoskeleton. lets say you had the assault rifle. If you selected that outside the mech you would select it. But in the mech, the mech would then read your database of weapons and change the mechs weapons to be like a stronger version of the assault rifle when you hit the key for the assault rifle. This was true for any weapon you tried to select, minus melee ones and some others.
I then fleshed out enemy ideas. Taking hitman213's enemy soldier idea, I added multiple versions of it into the game's new design document. There would be pistol guards with white uniforms and no helmets, shotgun guards with brown uniforms and helmets, soldiers with black uniforms and assault rifles, and similar. I even added in soldiers on motorcycles. I then took influence from supposed sightings of weird things that people say exist but there is no proof for them (aka bigfoot and the like) for the mutant enemies in the game. I had mutants inspired by El-Chupacabra (the Vampire Mutant - a flying demonic entity that attacks), the enfield horror (transylvanian Horror - a little small mutant that spits on you), etc... Some mutants however were completely new ideas and were not inspired by these things or fictitious monsters from x-files and the like, and were totally original ideas. The Lardass and the Musclehead were two of these. The lardass was a monster that was a huge fatass wearing a cop's uniform. He would shoot grenade launchers at you. The musclehead was a hulk like mutant that had the ability to break every bone in your body with one punch. Then came my idea for the first boss. A huge gigantic mutant at least the size of a house and in later design document renditions, the size of a mountain or skyscraper. This thing would be powerful and you would need vehicles to kill it. I then thought up some other mutant ideas. There would be a monster inspired by the X-Files Fluke Man living in a new jersey sewer system of all things (just like the x-files episode the fluke man is in), a giant monster made out of rock, and vines that could strangle you, because they are living...
Around then, I thought of what the levels would be like. Level 1 would be a level where you are living in Cape Cod, MA and the cult comes to arrest you. You would have to drive to Boston where in level 2 you have to meet the good guys and do a mission for them, which involves destroying a cult submarine in Boston Harbor. You from there would drive to Hartford, CT, where you would have to destroy a secret lab filled with mutants. But you are too late and the biggest mutant is being used to destroy NYC.. So you have to save NYC in the next mission. There would be the first boss. the monstrosity. In old versions of the story, you fought the monstrosity on Liberty Island when you had to kill hostages there... That lead to it pushing from the ground below. You would then need to fight it. From there the game went to a sewer system in NJ where you would have to fight the flukeman. Then it went to Savannah GA where you would have to get some secret weapons. Then came the Second boss fight, where you would have to kill the Cult General before he nukes another city.
From there it went to death valley, complete with rock beasts. You had to infiltrate a base that had new cyborgs being developed in it to destroy them. Once you destroyed them you were sent to hijack a plane and end up in Minneapolis. From there you would fight in Chicago and defeat the cult as they were building a massive fortress in the middle of the city, similar to the citadel from Half Life 2. But this is way before that idea. This was in 1995. Then came a part where the Anti-Social Services captured you and revealed themselves to be a front for the CSC cult, and you were put in jail. You had to escape and kill all the A.S.S. People and do the rest of the missions for yourself. From there you would fight a mutation boss in Seattle that looked like a giant pile of living guts. Then came the third episode, where you went to Antarctica, infiltrated a base that allowed you to board passage on a boat leading to an underwater base, which lead to a submarine that docked in the ruins of Baltimore, allowing you to sneak under the 500 mile wide force field the Cult had enacted over the ruins of DC and Baltimore, allowing you to infiltrate their inner sanctum and kill the Cult leader.
From there the cult leader would then speak to you and say he was a hellspawn all along and then there would be a big fight in a place that looked like hell, where you fought demons with magical weapons, including skyscraper sized demons. Then you would finally fight the cult leader in hell and defeat his spirit, ending the game.
Then came the day I got duke3d in pc gamer. It was the shareware version Everything that was tame about our idea was changed forevermore.... From this point on, or character would totally change. Gone was the Bastard who never said a thing and just killed things. Now he would kill things and quip one liners too! Once we saw that duke nukem was doing the same thing, we wanted Bastard be at least somewhat similar to duke but a lot different. So we had to think of Metal Music related one liners...
Here are few we thought up...
"Common you pussies!" - Source : Metallica
"Up The Irons" - Slogan used by Iron Maiden Fans (thought up later)
"You're soul betta belong to someone, cause your ass is mine!" - source : based on a megadeth lyric.
"Metal Up your ass" - Metallica's idea for what they wanted their first album to be called..
We then added these as one liners too.. None are metal related but they fit the mean character
Bastard was turning into...
"Damn, I got bigass feet" - Only said while looking down (you would be able to see your feet)
"Hey Porky, the Bible's what I use to wipe with after I masturbate!" - Said to a christian zealot who
whined about wanking as sinful.
"You fucking Turdburglar!"
"You Farging Icehole"
"Take that, Fatass!"
"Yup, that's one hellacious Dump!" - Hitman213 thought of this one... It's an iconic one liner for
bastard.
Duke3d, and Shadow Warrior especially, made us want to make vicious onslaught extremely offensive. We then from there on decided vicious onslaught was gonna have shit tons of gore, killing of innocent civilians, running over innocent civilians and enemies in vehicles, and disgusting ideas that tied in with certain weapons.
Next while watching a movie (Dracula, dead and loving it) Me and Hitman213 immediately thought of the enema launcher idea at the same exact time. Later on Hitman213 thought of what the enema launcher would do. It would hit an enemy in their rear end, cut through their clothes, pump their buts filled with hot soapy water, and then separate their upper body from their lower body, sending their upper body in the air, sending soap everywhere...
Next, my stun gun weapon idea (a weapon that would make enemies fall asleep), got a secondary fire. It would allow bastard to run up to an enemy, stomp on their chest, sending their intestines flying out of their mouth.
My Black Hole Gun idea also got a sick disgusting death associated with it as well. When you sucked enemies into black holes (It didn't shoot black holes, it formed black holes on enemies you aimed at) they would get sucked in, and then their guts would appear in a white hole over your head and splatter all over you... Hitman213 then thought up the idea for the skewer. It would shoot a dart into enemies that was on a chain, then impale them, coming out their back, then the dart would expand into a plate and then you could use the plate to disembowel enemies... by using a wench to pull in the dart...
But the ideas got worse.... I called hitman213 on the phone one night, and I asked for him to think up another weapon idea. The weapon idea he gave me was just a joke by him but I took it seriously.... The turd bomb! It was fleshed out later by me but what a disgusting idea he had thought up. I made it into a grenade that would explode in mid air dropping tons of radioactive turd on your enemies. It was such a disgusting idea, but he thought of it.
By then some other ideas for weapons were coming from our minds... He thought of a weapon that is really cool, the gasoline can. It would allow you to spread gasoline on the ground and light it with a match later. I then followed that up with my own idea, the splattering gas idea. Splattering gas was special nerve gas that made enemies gib, and it would quickly spread to nearby enemies... use it on one enemy, and a nearby horde of enemies would all get gibbed...
He then invented more disgusting weapon and cool weapon ideas as well. We had seen the movie Spawn and wanted that quad rocket launcher you see at the beginning when spawn is still a living human. It homes in separate targets per missile and was a really cool idea.
One of the worst ideas involved the first boss. Not the kill the hostages one you read above. But the next idea. I wanted this boss to throw trucks at you and also pick up school buses, grab them and turn them so they were pointing upwards, bite off the top and then "drink" down the kids (all 2-3 year olds), and then barf them up on the player! During this time the monstrosity was 150-300 feet tall not 30 feet tall and it got really bad...
I thought of more weapon ideas as well. One of the ones I liked was the spread rifle. It was inspired by the Spreadfire cannon from Descent. But instead of firing blue projectiles, it shot a spread of bullets. It basically was like a shotgun but more deadly. It fired bullets, not shells and was slow firing weapon...
We wanted Heavy Metal music by real bands in the game. We wanted to see if we could get Metallica, Anthrax, Megadeth, Slayer, ETC to allow us to use their music. The idea was thought of but quickly dropped because of royalty issues.
1997:
By this point we changed our focus. Before this point, our game idea would be a pure old school FPS. No signs of it becoming a realistic game. Till 1997... At this point me and him started to brainstorm some really extreme graphics ideas and some insanely realistic gameplay ideas that would transform our game idea from an oldschool FPS game to a realistic/oldschool FPS hybrid, which it still is to some extent but not as much...
His first words in 1997, were "we want this thing to be realistic"... So then I thought of ideas to make the game realistic. For one, I thought, there should be body part health. Each body part would have a different health meter, just like Deus Ex 1. But this was thought up long before Deus Ex... I wanted the health meters to affect things when they got low. If your leg health got too low, you would limp, if both legs got too low, you would crawl and need to find a health station or splint to restore your body parts.. If your hands were shot, you couldn't aim right, if your head was shot, you would die, if your chest was shot, you would get a heart attack, etc.
Along those lines we wanted the game's effects and graphics to be highly realistic. Bullets would deform walls, explosives would deform terrain, sending dirt in the air, shooting a glass window would cause glass shards to fly everywhere, hurting you, etc. Around this time I fleshed out what the world would look like. Pools of nuclear waste everywhere, ruined buildings, yet they were futuristic buildings, not modern ones. The sky was fleshed out a lot. The sky would be red, and there would be tons of explosions in the sky. Later on I added post apocalyptic weather effects such as ice and fire tornadoes to make things more interesting. During these, you had to run inside, or you would die.
The name for the game idea got changed around now. It was no longer being called breakpoint, instead it was called Onslaught. I got the name from a story of a Doom addon called Cleimos 2. In that addon's story it references games like doom and quake. But mentions a game after quake called onslaught that was supposedly so violent it got the government to ban FPS Games. Since our idea fit this so well, I changed the name to Onslaught. Later on it got renamed Vicious Onslaught due to idiots on 4chan trashing it. I didn't want people to find the 4chan board and hear what they said about it so I changed the name...
1998-2000:
From this point on the story would be fleshed out even more. Missions would get changed. The start of the game would not be on earth, but on a space station... You would then crash land in Boston. A new part of the game story was invented, where after Seattle, you would go through Canada, then Europe and then finally to outer space to stop a space station containing a crazy ai controlling nuclear missiles. You had to unplug this AI. This would then lead to the Antarctica part...
Weapon ideas were being completely redone by me. I added secondary fires to all of them and eventually third fire modes too. I also added several new, crazy weapon ideas on top of our already crazy ones. Ideas such as the Tsunami Gun (fires a wave that hits the ocean making a tsunami - only works along the sea), Nuclear Waste Gusher, Spike rifle, Lightning Rod (like quake's lightning gun), Overkill Cannon (an Automatic spread rifle like weapon that shoots 50 bullets per shot), and more...
2001-2002:
During this phase, the game started to change. It got shifted away from non-horror and then got some horror elements... I had planned missions in Europe before, but now scary stuff was seeping in... Including mutants that would wait behind doors and then spit on you (transylvanian horrors mostly), and worse.. More scary mutant concepts were creeping in. I was heavily inspired by "Clive Barker's Undying" to do this. It was the first Horror game I ever played and I loved it. Still do. I needed to make things scarier because of this...
I added several new ideas to make the game scary, including scary sounds being played, demons in the story line, fighting demons with magical weapons, and worse.. These ideas transformed the game into something far more scary.... The whole concept was being re-invented. To compensate for this, the dark one's story was completely re-invented by me.. Dr Choppa Schlonghoff was replaced with Virgil Ichabod, an evil cult leader who was half hell spawn half man (he had a hell spawn for a soul). It turns out every 2000 years he jumps into a body and tries to exterminate humanity. This time it almost worked...
Around then, our idea was being seriously overdone. We had tons of ideas. 100's of weapon ideas, 100's of monster ideas, 100's of level ideas, all city sized, with super realistic graphics like in modern games. In 1995 this could not be done. I suggested to hitman213 that we abandon the idea completely due to this. It was getting out of hand.... So we quit.
But the game would live on..... (10 years later)...
2004-2009:
Come 2004 I had tried to make several Doom Mods based on this idea. I failed to make good ones, and in some cases, I lost them in HDD failures. I eventually made a good vicious onslaught Doom Mod in 2009. It was very close to the original but had some different looking versions of some enemies. Lardasses were replaced with fat mancubus like things that were not mancubi but were close. Muscleheads became flaming monsters that charged at you... Soldiers were redesigned... Transylvanian Horrors and Vampire Mutants got changed too. Vampire mutants got their bodies un-winged and they would only walk. Transylvanian horrors became partial invisible vampire mutants... But the guns and the character were very close to our idea. A lot of ideas we had could not be done with the doom engine... I had to take out a ton, such as 3d textures, deformable terrain,
multiple body part health (like in Deus Ex 1), and a lot more... I added new concepts. I added the concept of a character and voice for Deltree *,*, the AI that controlled the space station armed with nuclear missiles. I made him join up with Bastard (who now had a new name - ASSHOLE!), to fight together to kill the Dark One in his cult base in Washington DC's Ruins.. I also did a lot to make the game easier to build. I did the voice-overs for all characters, the Anti-Social Services people, Asshole, Deltree, all of it. I also used music for my band at the time (Psychotic Fury/Unleashing Vengeance) as music for the game.
I also put in a concept of cyborg powers into the 2009 game/mod. You had 5 powers. Cloak, Heal, Night Vision, Shield, and Metal Rage. Cloak and Heal did what you think. So did night vision. Shield erected a forcefield around you for 10 seconds blocking all damage. Metal Rage made your weapons fire twice as fast, while Asshole said "AAAAAAA Metal up your ass!"...
But the game was not perfect. It stole too much from other doom mods to truly be releasable. But it was cool to play, for me. I only did it for me. I didn't care if anyone else liked it. Our idea was never going to go anywhere anyway, without a real gaming company with top of the line engines and experience behind it, so I kept it to myself.
2012-2016:
But it needed to be improved... The level design in the thing was quite bad at times (missing textures and worse). I was still a n00b at mapping then and still am today. I can script fine, texture fine, make music and voices fine but when it comes to level editing, I am terrible. So I decided to use Randomly Generated Maps to help me.
From 2012-2016 I made several versions of vicious onslaught using a Doom Random map Generator, each version used a different version of the generator to do maps. I released all of them but people didn't like them. I didn't give a fuck. I am not going to compromise Me and Hitman213's ideas for idiots in some gaming community, but the generators weren't too good then either.. So untill recently, I never really made an vicious onslaught with good mapping in it...
For music and textures in these new versions (including the latest), I relied on bumpmapped versions of photorealistic texture pack (a free half-life texture wad that has an urban theme) textures for the city levels, and some IKbase for CSC Bases. Music is music I composed in 2003 to be it's soundtrack if I ever made the game. Good thing I did that....
Since 2009, I have been very heavily inspired by Doom Slaughtermaps. I wanted Shit Tons of enemies in the maps. We always wanted large groups of enemies, but things like Hell Revealed and Sunder took this even further. They inspired by to make levels with 500+ enemies, 50+ bosses and worse... This game may be the first game to Embrace that concept and I like that idea, but that concept was not something the original design document for the game had.
The new version is almost done. Powered by my Randoom 3.5 random map generator, it has good but not great level design, but everything else is good. It features buying items, weapons and upgrades for cyborg powers, the ability to do missions in any order (with a few exceptions), missions you can choose from a mission computer, and two kinds of missions, story missions and side missions. Story missions have full voice overs for their story. Side missions have text messaged story... Most of the enemy ideas are there but they are based on realm667 beastiary enemies that look close and modified later to be more like the original ideas. The weapons, the same thing, but they are closer to the old ideas than the enemies. I like the way it came out. I've been playing it daily, doing a test run of the game on medium to see if I can beat it. It's been hard as hell to beat. But I've enjoyed it...
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