7DFPS 2020 - GRINDKILLMURDERSHOOT!
14th December 2020
This week I made GRINDKILLMURDERSHOOT, a grindcore inspired arena shooter.
This game came about through a happy meld of needing to book time off work, an unquenched desire to enter 7DFPS and a new found obsession with grindcore.
Like everyone else in the world, I found myself inside with more free time than ever this year. During this time one of my coping mechanisms has been discovering new music through bandcamp and expanding my physical music collection with a healthy dose of retail therapy. The Slave to the Grind documentary really opened my eyes to the world of grindcore and I’ve been soaking up all the rotten sounds I can get my hands on.
Internal Rot - Grieving Birth
Acts such as Internal Rot and Shitgrinder have opened me up to music as more of a mood rather than a collection of individual songs. A criticism I hear frequently about the genre is how similar each band and song sounds very similar and I’ll be the first to admit these people are in no way wrong.
But therein lies the appeal. I know what I want and I want a lot of it. I want a thundering train of blast beats, guttural screams and the occasional discernible guitar riff. This is the philosophy that fueled the idea for this game, an atmosphere of chaotic joy.
My goal was to create a stupid game. A game you don’t have to think too hard about. Just a loud, immature, ultraviolent mess. To that end, I believe I have fulfilled my goals.
I also did my best to incorporate the DIY element of grindcore as much as possible into my development process. All the sprites and weapons were drawn by myself and a couple of my housemates. We also had quite a bit of fun making some nasty gurgly and screaming sound effects which ended up getting boosted and distorted to absurd degrees.
That being said, I did copy the movement mechanics straight out of Quake 3. I knew I wanted it to control like Quake, so using the same code which someone already went to the effort to port to Unity seemed like an obvious solution.
GRINDKILLMURDERSHOOT is available to download on itch.io and playable in browser here (this version has less enemies than the download on itch for performance reasons).
🏠