Filcher - Thief and Deus Ex-inspired stealth game

[Carnage]

Seems quite interesting, maybe a bit rough around the edges. Available on Steam.

 

[Zerg Rush]

Looks interesting, although regarding the graphics, quite rudimentary, a requirement of 8Gb RAM specified as a minimum seems to me somewhat exaggerated.

[AluminumHaste]

Some of those levels might as well be The First City Bank and Trust lol. Looks cool.

[thebigh]

It kind of looks like if you dropped some Duke 3D era sprites into the original Half Life engine and rigged it all up to be a 1st person sneaker. It's got its own unique look, and the level design appears more than respectable.

The credits suggest the game is the work of just one guy, which is super impressive.

[datiswous]

The biggest gripe in the graphics department I think is the lack of proper animation (seeing from the video's). But maybe that's considered part of it's style?

Edited January 24, 2023 by datiswous
I think too much

[New Horizon]

Makes me think of the game that Looking Glass was developing called Deep Cover.  

[Anderson]

7 hours ago, Zerg Rush said:

Looks interesting, although regarding the graphics, quite rudimentary, a requirement of 8Gb RAM specified as a minimum seems to me somewhat exaggerated.

Only if the levels are as huge as in Thief 1/2.

[Zerg Rush]

1 hour ago, Anderson said:

Only if the levels are as huge as in Thief 1/2.

It's very respetable for a one man work, but I think it lacks for this to be good optimized.

Even Thief or TDM are working in 4 Gb RAM, 32 bits, like in my old PC where I played it some years ago. Search FREE stealth games in Steam, you'll see what games are there with similar or less sys needs. Include the Tomb Raider which I have need less.

With THIS graphics

• OS:Windows XP Service Pack 3, Windows Vista,7,8 (32bit/64bit)
• Processor:Dual core CPU: AMD Athlon64 X2 2.1 Ghz (4050+), Intel Core2 Duo 1.86 Ghz (E6300)
• Memory:1GB Memory (2GB on Vista)
   
• Graphics:DirectX 9 graphics card with 512Mb Video RAM: AMD Radeon HD 2600 XT, nVidia 8600
• DirectX®:9.0c
• Hard Drive:12 GB HD space

 

Edited October 21, 2021 by Zerg Rush

[Carnage]

13 hours ago, Zerg Rush said:

Looks interesting, although regarding the graphics, quite rudimentary, a requirement of 8Gb RAM specified as a minimum seems to me somewhat exaggerated.

Yeah thought the same, maybe it's a bit exaggerated or otherwise very badly optimized.

7 hours ago, datiswous said:

I think the biggest gripe in the graphics department I think is the lack of proper animation (seeing from the video's). But maybe that's considered part of it's style?

I think I read somewhere in the discussions on Steam that the camera system has been reworked and is now less janky.

At the moment there also doesn't seem to be a save system during levels (9 levels in total). And indeed it's developed by one person in Unity.

[New Horizon]

Unity..oy..from my experience testing it on multiple projects at work, including our own in house game Project Winter, it is a resource hog that most developers don't bother optimizing...or perhaps don't have the resources to optimize.  I don't work with it on the coding side of things but I get the impression that it doesn't necessarily provide developers with all of the deep, under the hood, tools they require to really streamline it.

[AluminumHaste]

A ton of indy games run on Unity and they run like garbage, especially over 60fps.

Even simplistic games have weird issues, like Cultic where the camera jitters when looking around while moving. And it's incredibly low poly but doesn't run very well.

 

Battleborn is another one, where the game tries to use all 24 threads of my CPU but I get another 20 fps if I limit the game to only 6 cores. The devs have not been able to fix the issue as of yet.

[JackFarmer]

On 10/21/2021 at 3:39 PM, New Horizon said:

Makes me think of the game that Looking Glass was developing called Deep Cover.  

I was just looking for background information on the internet. Based on the many screenshots that can be found, the design of the game areas was quite far. I think it would have been very good.

It must be terribly frustrating when you put so much work into a project and then you have to stop because there is no more money.

[lowenz]

On 10/23/2021 at 2:35 AM, AluminumHaste said:

A ton of indy games run on Unity and they run like garbage, especially over 60fps.

Even simplistic games have weird issues, like Cultic where the camera jitters when looking around while moving. And it's incredibly low poly but doesn't run very well.

 

Try the beta branch (of the demo, yes!)

[AluminumHaste]

I did, he supposedly did some things to fix it. It's reduced but not gone, and it feels horrible to play.

[lowenz]

With an iGPU Intel UHD 630 and DDR4 2400 @2560x1440, other settings:

The RX 570 makes it fly over 140 FPS.....

I love this little jewel so much! It's voxelized Blood+Duke Nukem!

Edited October 24, 2021 by lowenz

[thebigh]

So I played the first few levels of the Filcher demo. I still think it's an impressive effort for a single developer, but it's just really really rough.

Great sound and lighting are what made the first two Thief games and The Dark Mod what they are. The ability to tell where guards by the volume and position of their footsteps is so fundamental you don't really realise what you're missing until you have to do without. With no effective sound portaling, it sounded like all the guards in the level were tapdancing around me all the time and I had no idea where they were.

Jumping can be janky too. You know how in TDM when there's a bit of a downwards lip on something you're trying to jump off, sometimes jumping just doesn't work? Like a horizontal metal pipe you haven't surrounded with a block of nodraw_metal. Dial that annoyance up to 11 for Filcher.

On the plus side, the level design itself is fine. I like the idea of giving an overall stealth score based on both loot and ghostyness. You get a score out of 50 for the amount of loot you get, so if you get 80% of the loot you get 40 points. Then you get bonus points for not blackjacking anyone, not getting spotted, setting off no alarms, and so forth. It's a neat little system. And I do kind of like the almost art-deco style.

A little bit of polishing up would make this a hell of a lot better. It's just not quite there yet. The thing is, you could make the same levels and gameplay in TDM in half the time and it would look and sound twice as good.

[Shadow]

Definitely old school Doom/Duke Nukem style, yet very artistically noir, some buildings might look kinda Grim Fandango. There is no save function in game as you are reset back to the beginning if you die. Frustrating to have to replay the same hallways over and over. Thief/TDM it is not and should not be in the same breath except only for sharing the stealth genre.

[lowenz]

The release of *CULTIC* first chapter is set for October

 

It's literally what Dusk would have been with more design competence.

Cultic is TOTALLY recommended, the perfect boomer shooter and homage to those good old times of Blood.

Edited September 26, 2022 by lowenz

[AluminumHaste]

That's such a weird statement, dusk and cultic are not really directly comparable. 

Dusk is more like doom and quake, cultic is totally duke/blood.

They are both great though I beat the cultic demo twice,  don't really feel like playing it more.

Dusk OTOH I've played through probably 10 times now.

[lowenz]

Dusk has the Doom gameplay of course, but it's so poor in a good number of design aspects and choices to be a "Doom/Quake killer".

That's what I'm talking, Cultic is just perfect about the *design*, it's Blood on steroids.

 

If you want the perfect Quake experience just try Arcane Dimensions

And for Doom just try CountryCide: https://www.moddb.com/mods/trench-foot-wip/downloads/countrycide

Edited September 26, 2022 by lowenz

[AluminumHaste]

2 hours ago, lowenz said:

Dusk has the Doom gameplay of course, but it's so poor in a good number of design aspects and choices to be a "Doom/Quake killer".

 

Such as?

[lowenz]

Take the enemies design, they're really not so "scary" being Dusk an horror game. Quake Ogres are still nightmarish creatures (combat behaviour, visual "impression", etc.) no matter the low poly technical aspect. It's all about the design.

Edited September 27, 2022 by lowenz

[Zerg Rush]

It is not necessary to have some images that put the Graphic Driver to make a barbecue and require a NASA PC, to be a good game, other things matter

[AluminumHaste]

On 9/27/2022 at 5:59 AM, lowenz said:

Take the enemies design, they're really not so "scary" being Dusk an horror game. Quake Ogres are still nightmarish creatures (combat behaviour, visual "impression", etc.) no matter the low poly technical aspect. It's all about the design.

Eh, I think for a lot of people the age at which they played the games, has a large impact on their perception of the game.
We're much more impressionable when we're younger, and things like movies, books, games etc can leave lasting impressions on us. But as we get older, it's not as easy to impress us or wow us, or make such an impression.
 

At least that's what it's been for me. I played Quake 1 in highschool. Games these days have to get lots of things right in order to impress me.
I loved that game so much it's my profile picture.

For me, Dusk was also one of those games. Played it through multiple times now on harder and harder difficulties, going back through quicksaves to see if I could pull off perfect encounters, just like in Quake1/2.
 

 

I love em both, I find they have similar styles/presentations.

[AluminumHaste]

On 9/27/2022 at 5:59 AM, lowenz said:

Take the enemies design, they're really not so "scary" being Dusk an horror game. Quake Ogres are still nightmarish creatures (combat behaviour, visual "impression", etc.) no matter the low poly technical aspect. It's all about the design.

But how is that "so poor"? And Dusk wasn't made to be a Doom/Quake killer, it was done in homage of those games.

Though don't really agree on Doom, it's movement and aiming being so limited.