Hey everyone, this is Grant Stewart, lead designer at Auroch Digital. We are developing Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun, a bloody and frenetic homage to retro shooters of yore, and we’re thrilled to share a new gameplay trailer and announce the game’s release date: May 23rd! The game is available for pre-order on PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4, so load up your bolter!
In Boltgun, you play as a battle-hardened Space Marine on a perilous mission across the galaxy to battle the warriors and demons of Chaos. You’ll unleash a devastating Imperial arsenal as you blast through an explosion of sprites, pixels, and blood, in glorious boomer shooter style. Here’s a little more about how the game delivers a unique Warhammer 40,000 experience with the perfect blend of classic, frantic FPS gameplay and stylish visuals of your favorite retro shooters from the 90s.
modern engine
In old classic shooters, enemies were just dropped into the environment for you to shoot as a very sophisticated target. Boltgun presents a modern approach to this. In addition to many classic locations with carefully hand-placed enemies, there are also areas where waves of Heretics are dynamically spawned by an intelligent system to seek out the most exciting positions to challenge the player. In these situations, designers select enemies using a “nodegraph” and build increasing “encounters”. They then populate battle “arenas” using “spawn points”, to designate locations where enemies can spawn in the world and “zones”, controlling which positions they must try to move to during the game. fight. As the fight progresses, the AI searches for the most suitable area and attempts to move there and engage the player.
A tactical marine and his finite state machines
In early shooters, intelligence was “hard-coded” into the AI brain. They moved, hunted, and shot according to simple rules that were performed largely in order. The current zeitgeist for digital adversaries revolves around “behaviour trees”, hierarchies of commands that the AI executes based on factors in the environment. Boltgun’s AI uses an alternative called “Finite State Machines”, a system first popularized by the Grunts of Half-Life. Each enemy has a brain that looks like a nodegraph. Within the graph are “state” nodes that AI thoughts can occupy. When an AI is in one of these states, it performs the actions of that state (shooting a gun, walking towards the player, throwing a grenade) and then uses “conditions” to determine which state to move to. then it must pass. Our AI has states for all of their attacks, but also for ‘conscious’, ‘unconscious’, ‘flinch’, ‘dead’ and ‘overkill’. Everything Boltgun’s enemies can do, including exploding into chunks of flesh, is part of their state machine.
vintage painting
Unlike the full 3D models used for characters and objects in modern video games, retro games used “sprites”, two-dimensional lists of pixel colors that represented flat images. As a modern game emulating those vintage aesthetics, Boltgun employs a hybrid system taking the best of modern technology and smashing it, pixels first, in the old ways.
A 3D model of Warhammer 40K
The undisputed best retro shooter, id’s Doom had a unique approach to creating its characters. The developers built mock-ups (scale models) of Doom’s enemies and then photographed them from different directions. The photographs were then digitized and used in-game to represent the enemies. Modern games have become extremely good at creating beautiful characters that move realistically, as there are countless tools dedicated to this. For Boltgun, we created a hybrid process. Our enemies are modeled and textured in modern sculpting software, paying close attention to the detail of Games Workshop tabletop miniatures. Then they are “rigged”, a process of giving them bones to form a skeleton that controls how the model can move. Once fully rigged, the models are passed to the animation team to bring them to life.
This is all pretty standard in the current game industry process, but the next step is where Boltgun’s unique magic happens. Our animated models are first “rendered” as digital images, then virtual cameras take pictures of the models in eight directions as they move through the frames of their animations. These images are imported into the Unreal Engine and reconstructed into 2D flipbook animations. Each animation is collected together and data for the enemy they represent is created to allow our artists to fine-tune them and define where in the animation an enemy should deal damage, make a sound or throw a fireball .
So now you know that while we’re having fun claiming Boltgun is an authentic 90s game, remastered by the talented team at Auroch Digital; the truth is that Boltgun is a very modern game built from the ground up in a very modern engine!
Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun is available for pre-order on PS5 and PS4 and will be released on May 23.
