Onslaught was a game idea that me and a close friend. Hitman213 had. It was supposed to be a duke3d style shooter with a metal twist… It later on got made into a standalone gzdoom engine game by me.
By 2002 Onslaught’s design document got huge. 150+ enemies, 150+ monsters, 150+ levels all set up all over the world. Not just US, Not Just US+Canada, But US+Canada+Europe+other places as well.. The game was a post apocalyptic shooter so you would be visiting post apocalyptic cities…
By that point, I didn’t want to scrap ideas, but I had to. It was getting too big. There is no way a company could do 150 guns, with all of them needing duplicates set up in an exoskeleton vehicle, never mind 150 monsters and Levels as well… So I cut the levels to 30 and guns and enemies to 50. I thought 30 levels would be fine and 50 enemies and 50 guns would be doable at the time. So I had to begin the painful process of figuring out what to axe and what to keep… I could not axe Hitman ideas, or good ones I had. But the problem is that I had too many good ideas! It was tough to get rid of ideas like the Tsunami Gun and Asteroid attractor because you need to keep more important ideas in the document for the company to read.
So I ditched tons of weapon, vehicle, monster and level ideas. Gone were the Europe Ones, minus the Owlman and Castle ones. A lot of ideas were cut for this thing to work. But it was all for nought as it turned out…
Our design document was formatted wrong in the end… I read a guide on how to make a design document and their order of things made no sense but we had to adhere to it. See they wanted per level descriptions of guns and monsters… Not seperate section descriptions, where all the monsters are described in the monsters section, and all the weapon ideas are described in the weapons section. They wanted me to decide which weapons would be in which level and put them in that level section.
This would be hours of work. I chose not to do it at all. I chose to quit.
I then told hitman213 that our idea was done. There is no way I could put it in the right order when we had 50+ guns in the game and 50+ enemies and 30+ levels… It would take days… I didn’t like it… Other issues also prevented me from doing the document right, so we scrapped it. And it’s a good thing we did, because I learned around 7-10 years later that game companies just don’t accept ideas from outside. A rather rude blog post said that no one cares about your game but you so make it yourself. I did that this year. It took 20+ attempts to get it right, but in the end this was the best course of action…
Vicious Games 