Is there any public for a Rail Shooter engine?

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Hi,

I’m currently working on an engine/editor to make Rail Shooters of various shapes (but basically HotD-like games), and after some canvassing on the local forum, I’m coming here to get some advice on wether people would or would not be interested in this kind of tool.

I’ve made a thread on the WIP forum but didn’t reach any interest, but I know I suck at communication and selling things.

So here I am, asking the big question before trying to get it any further: Is it a big yes or a big no?

Pictures for better understanding:

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I like rail shooters, but they are not too difficult to make by default, so I wouldn’t be interested in suhc framework.

(Also, you really should consider adding spline support for movement.)

You could try converting this idea into generic scene-wide animation framework, which could direct movement of multiple objects at once. Something similar to Unreal’s Matinee.
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Matinee/
This might catch attention of larger audience.

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Hello,

Thank you for your answer.

Well, “not too difficult”, it depends on how far you’re willing to push it; you could use USequencer or whatever, put a simple serie of splines (That I actually was wondering if it was interesting to add or not, thank you for bringing this up), or a single, very long spline, your camera, drop a few monsters here and there and you have it. I’ve seen a bunch of this stuff on VR recently.
And Thank you for your submition on this matinee-like asset. Unfortunately, I’ve already got my fulltime job where I’m getting told what to do.

No, seriously, I’m not a specialist in animations nor in Editor scripting, I’m not gonna try to make Matinee.
I’m learning the editor scripting right now. I’m really not into tool building. My goal is to make a railshooter or two and explore the variations of the concept because I like it, and I need this tool. I just though I could show it to the world to see if anybody might be interested. Seems to be a no-no.

Thank you again for your answer.

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That’s why I mentioned Matinee.
Unreal’s animation system is quite powerful, and scene wide controller with abilities similar to those of Montages would allow every single thing you mentioned. Plus it will be applicable to other games.

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You are asking for opinions… well, you will get mine:

I hate rail shooters. With a passion. Played some in the 90’s when they were all the rage, and game devs experimented with all those limited expieriences like interactive Movies and stupid things like that.
It was a boring expierience even then. It was the lowest point of the stupid Die Hard console game for the PS1… the other modes were not that great, but at least you could amass big piles of bodies in the 3rd person stealth Die Hard 1 mode by making a dead end staircase youre mouse trap the goons were walking into one after another, and driving around the Die Hard 3 bomb collecting race mode was slightly fun because of all the mayhem you could cause driving into other cars and pedestrians.
The Die Hard 2 on rails shooter on the other was just boring. No fun to be had straying off the beaten path because, well, the expierience was on rails.

Now, that might be an example for a BAD on rails shooter. And certainly, as always you will find fans that are not so fussed about the limitations of the on rails expierience.

But the on rails shooter died in the 90’s, as far as the AAA games are concerned, for a good reason. Even today some way more interactive shooters are critisized for their “on rails” expierinces where the player is restricted on where to go, and is shuffled from set piece to set piece, with no real agency in how to tackle obstacles or to play the actual game. People start calling that interactive movies.
I would imagine, getting around THAT in a REAL on rails expierience will be even more difficult. Giving the player agency, and different ways to tackle obstacles… difficult without giving the player freedom of movement.

To get back ontopic: my personal, very pessimistic opinion is: I don’t think there is enough of a market to justify the development of a whole “on rails shooter engine”…
It might be that the limited VR equipment of today will create more shortterm demand for on rails shooters… but you can bet these shooters will die a quick death once players tire of them, and technology advances more. It will be the 90’s all over again for these on rail expieriences.

Also, as other have said… how hard is it really to create an on rails expierience? It might be useful for the coding iliterate, everyone who knows his stuff programming wise might have written the code for his on rails expierience in a breeze. As soon as player agency is taken away, testing is a breeze anyway, so coding will be quick, testing easy, and no many iterations needed.

But hey, prove me wrong if you are hellbent on it. Maybe there is enough of a market for on rails shooters, maybe there are enough devs who would pay for such an asset to speed up their devlopment. Good luck with your asset anyway :slight_smile:

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lol yeah rail shooters even sucked before goldeneye N64 lol

but yeah I HATE mobas, like League of Legends WITH A PASSION!!!
…so yeah…

(Paladins is cool though, but Overwatch SUCKS!) :stuck_out_tongue: lol

… true though, VR has ALOT of onrails shooters, it “works” … but i also saw on the tv news (lol) that VR is failing to sell ( satisfactorily to the makers ) ? … but the hardware is expensive,
personally i found GearVR to be AWESOME tech , experience, but like ALL the games SUCK! and i had a very hard time attempting to come up with a concept that i was interested in… but yeah i suck too :stuck_out_tongue:

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Gian, Bucky, thank you for your (brutally?) honest replies.

And I HATE MMOs, but with disdain… does that makes me a bad person?

Gian, I could argue with every point you made but I’ll leave it at that:

Challenge accepted.

Also, I don’t recall exactly the on-rail part of Die Hard Trilogy, just that you could edit it in some debug mode and end up stuck because enemies were found off screen (and the creepy face cheat). My reference will always be House of the Dead 2, just try it for a couple of runs and try to find different roads,

Finally,

Well, sucks to be them then, that’s not the way (I think) you create something.

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Well, I might have gone overboard detailing were I was coming from, but you got to understand my knowledge of rail shooters is from the 90’s, so there is a good chance that some rail shooters have mutated the formula enough to make rail shooters less of linear expierience :slight_smile:

If there are, yeah, sure, maybe I should give it another chance.

Anyway, you asked for opinions, I gave mine. I personally don’t see such a huge market for rail shooters. As said, VR might change that, initially, and I am not terribly familiar with the demand and supply on the mobile app stores, might be a huge thing there without my knowledge.
Sure, if you are not in it for the money, you might get some interest. I doubt its enough to warrant the development costs, though IDK how much time you plan or end up spending on it.

Looking the tag “on-rails shooter” up on steam spy reveals two things: not many games tagged as on rails shooter (24, though of course, the steam spy data might be incomplete and the tagging system might not be used by all games), and actually quite a healthy interest in a rather niche genre by todays standarts (some games having 300’000 owners even though being sold at a quite premium 20$).
IDK… as a middleware/engine developer I would be more worried about the low amount of games than happy about the seemingly still existing interest among players. Good for developers of actual games, not so good for the guy producing tools for those devs.
Of course, a quite amateur opinion based on incomplete data, so take it with a mountain of salt.

http://steamspy.com/tag/On-Rails+Shooter

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No problem, really, you went overboard in no way. I value your opinion.

I’d even say the genre kind of regressed, but I still have to look for the existing games, thanks for your research, I didn’t knew you could do that with Steam Spy (sometimes, I can be so clueless). I’m gonna browse through all of them to see if they pulled out some interesting games mechanics.
Yeah, it’s a niche genre, but studios focalised so much on the shooting part they must have alienated most of the public. And they forgot it could be coupled with so many things, even puzzle or RPG elements, why not? The maze mechanics are my favourite, though.

So, yeah, thank you, really, having a feedback is important, even more if it’s sincere; and I’m used to brutally honest people, so It’s cool.

Have a good day, sir.

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Sounds like a good niche to target with less competition. Too bad I’m not into on-rails shooter fan.
Actually there have been I think 2 other packs advertised recently either in wip or asset store threads that are on-rails shooter kits. Good luck on your pack!

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I have to say, I loved me some rail shooters! I finished House of the Dead at my local arcade back in the day. Don’t know how much money I spent on it… I also loved the Time Crisis series, played them all the time at the arcade and bought them for ps2. I think it’s a genre that is deffinitely been overlooked in the past few years and could be really renewed with a lot of fresh gameplay mechanics as was being mentioned. Come to think of it, I wonder how you would go about making a light gun game in unity… Also, I always considered Star Fox to be a kind of on rails shooter. Sure, you can move a little but you really are on a predetermined path. Looking forward to seeing what you come up with!!

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@gian-reto-alig : Idk about you, but I quite loved StarFox, that was technically rails I believe, and was one of the most popular games to ever be made. Some people will pay thousands of dollars for a very specific version of it lol.

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Thanks, just found this asset you talk about, the WIP is mine I suppose.

Funny thing that it came out barely a month ago.

Man, this is destroying my motivation… Not being believed in is something I can deal with, but discovering I’m the second because of a few weeks, this is beyond frustrating. I’ve been working on this project since august and wanting to start it for years. I checked back in august but I can’t keep o checking the store every week…

And his project is so similar to mine, conceptualy speaking, (but more advanced, obviously) I barely dare to keep on developing mine, talk about selling it.

I’ll keep going, at least for me… I’ll see if I can add some value to my product to see if I sell it or not…

I’m litteraly decompensating right now.

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It happens all the time. Most fun scenario is when somebody implements a game idea you had in mind long time ago.

Basically, if you feel like doing it, do it for fun. If you’re after money, that’s another story.

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@MauriceWillinger : Welcome to game development. The market that will slit your throat just to get an edge.

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I would pick it up if you made a rail shooter kit

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Yeah, I know it’s like that, and I’m OK with it. I mean, a good idea is always already done by someone else.
But here, the timelaps between his release and my submission is so short I couldn’t anticipate it (and I checked, multiple times before), on a type of project that… just check the poll. Who would have bet on that kind of game?

I kind of chose this project because I hate competition. And yet I end up in direct competition with one guy, better than me from what I see, and I’m already second by far.

But I got better. I just gonna edit my previous messages because it contains all all kind of features and I wouldn’t want to give away most of my ideas.

Competition sucks.

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If you can’t beat the competition through features then you can always try to beat them through other means. Some major aspects that immediately spring to mind are integration with other assets and providing excellent docs and support.

For an example of integration with other assets I highly recommend you look at PlayMaker. It’s a very popular solution for people who dislike or find it difficult to learn to write scripts. If the competition lacks integration support your solution would be an automatic win for someone who uses PlayMaker for scripting and wants to build this style of game.

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Well, to me Star Fox was not really an on-rails shooter… I do see though where you are coming from, movement of the ship was certainly very limited. I would compare it more to todays “limited FPS expieriences” like the CoD Campaigns that forces you on very linear paths and shovel you from setpiece to setpiece than with the on-rails shooters I have played.

Certainly a similar love-hate relationship as with on-rails shooters for most player, either you love the big moments shown off in movie like fashion, or you hate the limited freedom of movement and options.
To be honest, I loved Star Fox for its “big moments”, the awesome soundtrack, and the simple fact that the 3D graphics were new and exciting on the SNES. But it was not a game I played for long… I am not even sure if I finished the game really. The SNES had a strong rooster of games, and there were many more exciting coming out that year.

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If it’s any consolation, this happens pretty much every time I think I have a good idea. Sometimes I find out about the other thing before investing serious work, sometimes I’m over a year into it.