Onslaught is almost released… I am working on doing some extra stuff for it, but the game is essentially done now. But to get it out there I need to show off just how much work was put into it. People will assume it was quickly put together, and they would be right, but the ideas behind it were thought up over the course of over 25 years of work from 1995 to now.
Onslaught began as breakpoint, an ambitious idea for a video game thought up by my best Friend, a guy named Bill. I will call him by his Internet nickname, Hitman213 from now on. He wanted help on it so I joined in and it became a joint effort to make a video game idea for a company to be given somehow. Over the years tons of ideas would be thought up by both Hitman and Me and we never actually gave it to a gaming company.
So the Design of the game idea officially started in 1995. Me and him decided to try to think up a really good game idea and give it to a company. The first thing we did is sketch stuff. He sketched our character and 3 weapons, a flamethrower, a spiked yoyo and a machine gun.
Our character was a mercenary. We had no name for him yet. Or a backstory. All we had was a look. He was a big muscular guy with long hair and a helmet on. Nothing about him was known then. He started quite tame compared to what he became later, because we didn’t know what to do with him. The original premise is that you were doing missions to stop some kind of military group and it was kind of like Rise of the Triad then. The post apocalyptic setting was not even part of it back in 1995. This was a completely different game idea, with a quite normal look to it, a lot of military bases, fighting soldiers and some cacodemon ripoffs. In some ways it was better than the current game but in a lot it was far worse… Our character was not even supposed to speak, either.
So we needed a story. Hitman came up with a really bad one that I hated right away. Some madman with resurrection powers starts resurrecting evil people in history, think Napoleon, Hitler, Genghis Khan, etc… I hated it because it involved fighting nazi’s like wolf3d. I didn’t want this to be a wolf3d clone so I thought of a better story.
I told hitman that I didn’t like his story. So I thought of my own. I thought that maybe we should go down a post apocalyptic route. After seeing Terminator : Future Shock for the first time I needed our game to be similar. I also needed cultists as villians. The Insane Cult was born. Their leader was known as the dark one. They would nuke Washington DC and Paris and threaten the end of the world, when they sent an army of mutations to kill off survivors. This became our story for the game, At my insistence. He wanted the madman with resurrecting powers to be part of it. I didn’t…
Hitman fleshed out our character more. He was to be a mercenary and he was going to be a bad guy, not a good guy… He didn’t want the character to be a goodie two shoes He told me. Besides that the character was not much different from most mercenaries…
So I suggested to him that the character you play as should be a cyborg and a metalhead. “Bastard” was born. We now had a completely badass main player character to go into our game which he wanted a new name for by this time. In 2001 I suggested the name Onslaught. That is for a later post why I chose the name and where I got the name from.
Bastard started as an organization, not a character. Initially BASTARD was the good group of people opposing the cult. Boston Army of Secret Troops and Royal Defenses is what BASTARD stood for. He didn’t like this name but suggested we call our player character Bastard. We still needed a name for the good guys in the story and a backstory… We had a really cheezy name for the villain of the game, he wanted the villain to be named DR Choppa Shlonghoff. So we needed good guys.
So I thought up, maybe we should call the good guys, American Social Services. He didn’t like this, and instead said, how bout ANTI-Social Services. He got the name from An Anthrax Song. Now the game had become a “metal” game.
His sketches weren’t enough. We needed full sketches of everything in the game. I started drawing items and weapons and monsters. I came up with basic items the player would have. I forgot most of these today. One I remember, the health backpack, that was it.
We then started thinking of weapon ideas for our game.
These were ones I thought of:
Stun Gun – A gun that knocked enemies unconsious
Black Hole Gun – Shoots black holes at enemies
Assault Rifle
Laser Rifle/Cannon
Napalm Cannon – Some kind of flame weapon
Triple Chaingun – 3 Chainguns in one. It would start as 1 chaingun but you could upgrade it to be a dual chaingun then a triple chaingun. This idea long predates the total ripoff that is the project brutality triple chaingun, as well as the similar total ripoff that is the mobile turret in doom 2016. Both of them stole OUR idea. I don’t like it much. Due to that this weapon idea was never actually used in the final game.
Soon Hitman thought of other weapon ideas:
Flamethrower
Machinegun
Skewer – A spike shooting weapon that impales enemies, gibbibng them grossly.
Asskicker – Two bazookas mounted on a backpack.
Gasoline Can – A weapon where you can spray gasoline and light it later.
Soon we needed monster and enemy ideas. I thought of 90% of them that you see today.
You start by facing CSC soldiers. Weak ones have a white uniform, with an earpeice in one ear but no helmet. These were actually invented by Hitman but were cut and reinvented as guys with night vision goggles and invisibility shields on. You then had cult soldiers, black clad soldiers with machine guns. Shotgun soldiers in brown uniforms also existed. Then came the mutants. All were inspired by monsters supposedly seen in real life like big foot,etc.
-Transylvanian Horror – Monster with pink eyes and three legs
– Vampire Mutant – Big winged mutant, powerful
– Muscleheads – Big hulk like things. This was based on a drawing in his notebook
– Lardasses – Big fat guys in cop uniforms with grenade launchers as weapons. Later reinvented as mutants that looked more like Mancubi from Doom but different.
-Monstrosity – The first boss. A giant house sized mutant that eventually grew to a huge size (180 feet tall or bigger). He was to be fought in New York City.
I designed what 100% of the levels were like. You started in cape cod fighting the cult trying to arrest you. You go from there to be recruited by the anti social services in Boston. Then you blow up a cult submarine in the next boston level. From there you enter hartford to figure out why an underground city got infested with mutants. A lab was working on the monstrosity and that escaped and is in NYC so you go to there in the next level and fight it as the first boss.
The next levels took place in the following cities:
Newark NJ
Virginia
Savanna GA
Miami FLA
The Miami level was hectic. You had to kill a cult general before he could nuke the city. It was timed. I hated timed missions but this felt like a timed mission made sense here…
From there you go to episode 2. You start in death valley where the cult is manufacturing cyborg warriors. You have to destroy them and the base that was making them. From there the game went to
Las Vegas
Minneapolis
Chicago
San Diego.
Once you beat the san diego mission you were thrown in the jail of the ASS and it is revealed that they work for the CSC Cult villians. You then had to escape and kill them too, as revenge. The rest of the game was not fleshed out at this time.
Hitman213 got weapon ideas from many movies including :
-terminator shotgun
– Nailbomb
-split missiles
-enema launcher
The enema Launcher was one of the most disgusting weapon ideas in the game. It shot a missile that homed into asses of enemies and then they got pumped with soap, sending their body flying in the air, leaving the legs on the ground but their chest and head flying up and then it would be gibbed by an impact on the ceiling. Other sick ideas he had were the Toothpaste tube death, a secondary fire for the stun gun that makes it so bastard jumps on the chest of unconsious victims hit by it and their intestines fly out their mouth.
Our idea was going to be controversial. It still is. It’s gory as hell. he wanted it this way. It was his game idea mostly I just helped a lot. He wanted tons of gore and worse stuff. He wanted horrible offensive oneliners, a reaction to us seeing Duke3d for the first time in 1996. And then shadow warrior influenced us to make bastard even more offensive thanks to Lo Wang being the same way. Remember how Bastard started as a non speaking character? Well he became a duke nukem like character the instant duke3d did one liners and we saw and liked that.
Besides gun ideas, we had tons of vehicle ideas and other funny ideas to throw in. I wanted jeeps, airplanes, hoverboards, etc for vehicles, plus an exoskeleton, which I will get into later. Hitman wanted a Mack Truck for a vehicle that would be involved in a funny cutscene feature he nicknamed the death cam. The Exoskeleton was just like a walking mech from stuff like shogo. Unlike those however, it didn’t have set guns like the rest of the vehicles. It mimicked guns you had outside the exoskeleton. It would then be able to recreate more powerful versions of them when hitting the number key that selects them inside the exoskeleton.
The Death cam was not like the one in Wolf3d. It triggered not when you killed bosses but when you killed enemies in humorous ways. One way was to kill a guy and send him flying out the window of a skyscraper. Hitman wanted the death cam to display the guy, getting up, brushing himself up and then getting hit by a mack truck…. There were other ideas, but I don’t remember them today. This was 20 years ago.
Onslaught was so controversial, it had disgusting features all over it, like eating guts for health and worse… This game was going to rip shit like shadow warrior to shreds if we got a good company to release it. All we needed was a better name then breakpoint, the name we were using then.
I was reading a text file for a Doom 2 Wad called Cleimos 2 in 1997 when inspiration hit. The story for this addon is that you were playing as “nuts” kelton and were trying to shut down a virtual reality demon invasion, not a real one. The story mentioned games like Doom and Quake. It also mentioned a game far worse than quake that spilled through society like a drug and caused games to be banned. That game was was called Onslaught. That game name was IT! We needed our game to be called that. The game fit our game like a glove. Overly violent and disgusting, we needed to call our game Onslaught from there on. I credit Rand Phares (one of the authors of Cleimos 2), for thinking of the name.
We Wanted metal music for Onslaught. Our original idea was to have real metal bands play in it. At the time we liked a lot of thrash. So we wanted Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax to actually have their music in the game. That changed later, as I composed my own music for it, still metal of course. We even wanted Phil Anselmo of Pantera fame to do the voice of Bastard. Later on I would do that too…
I wanted security systems in Onslaught. Cameras, laser grids , etc. You had to avoid setting off the alarm. This was inspired by Crusader : No remorse, mostly. That later on got cut from the game because It slowed down the gameplay a lot.
In late 1997 realistic ideas started to sneak into Onslaught. We wanted 3d Textures, Deformable terrain and health bars for different body parts like in Deus Ex 1. We thought, make it realistic. Make it so when bastard gets shot too much in the leg, he would limp and have to find a splint, and if he loses both legs, he would have to find a body restore station to continue. These ideas helped to make the game a lot more realistic, at least on paper, but none of them made the cut. They actually ruin good FPS gameplay, so I cut them all….
Vicious Games 