Project Lakewood - Epic Wiki
# Project Lakewood
Game Information
Project: Lakewood
Developer
Project Lakewood Dev Team
Engine
Unreal Engine 4
Platforms
Windows, Linux
Release Date
TBA
Genre
Online First Person Shooter
Project Lead
James Rollo
# Contents
# Summary
Project: Lakewood isn't your typical first person shooter. Designed from the ground up to be a labor of love between many of the modern FPS kingpin franchises, Project: Lakewood sets out to attempt to bring fresh new gameplay to an otherwise stale and lifeless genre. With mechanics never before seen in a first person shooter, it's posed to take the genre to new levels with it's focus on temporal causalities, near future weaponry, and balls-to-the-wall full on fun.
# Gameplay
Project: Lakewood, at it's current design standpoint, is focused to be a modern fusion of the classic Doom or Quake style arena gameplay, with the modern tactical class based and arcade style run and gun games we have today. It goes deeper than that though. The aim is to create a game that is fun and rewarding, while rewarding smart team based gameplay and fast thinking, and foregoing the "one man army" that many modern games seem to adopt while simultaneously allowing the game to be skill driven and fast paced. There's so many mechanics and gameplay features I want to share with you, but until I have something I can show to the public it's all being kept under tight wraps.
# Development
Project: Lakewood had it's first build compiled on May 24, 2013. Back then, it started as a simple Source 2007 mod to bring more arcade like arena style gameplay to the Source engine.
However, eventually the desire to build something more than that grew. The project was switched to UDK after a few weeks of work with Source led James to see that he would have to completely rewrite major systems in Source to bring the kind of flexibility he enjoyed in modding games like Quake and even the older Call of Duty titles. Nothing much really came of this attempt, however, and the project was quickly abandoned due to lack of interest.
The project was picked back up the day Valve released Source 2013 to the public. With the hope that Valve had cleaned up a lot of the annoyances had with the older SDK's, work started anew, this time with a more elaborate goal in mind: To create a real game instead of just a fan mod. However, even though most of the annoying engine quirks were fixed, there was still the glaring issue of having to completely rewrite large portions of the games' current framework to get the kind of modability required. Instead, development was shifted to focus more on the design side of things than actual code. Story, experimental gameplay ideas, mechanics, the game received a lot of thought and care during this period, and a lot of effort into learning how game development was done.
However, onc day, the decision was made to switch engines one last time. Back on UDK, now that James had lots of coherent ideas as well as a basic prototype, the game exploded. Scaleform menu's, maps, weapons, basic gameplay mechanics, the game flourished with the new engine and this new direction and dedication. On December 31st, James released to the team the first testing build of Project Lakewood. Met with mixed impressions, it was the first time people got together and really sat back and had fun with everything they had done up to this point. A few more builds were released, each one getting more and more polished, adding more maps, better menu's, more weapons, even a "login" integration to a webserver with basic server browser capability. It didn't work really, but it would connect to one server.
The last build was compiled the day before Epic announced Unreal Engine 4 was available to the public. The decision was made to port the existing game to Unreal 4, due to the source code being available and the team's desire to bring the game to emerging platforms like Linux, as well as the desire for the improved workflow and new technologies present in the engine.
Work was slowed due to real life obligations by the entire team, but it is continuing, albeit slowly. Currently the project is picking up speed due to most of the team being home due to summer break, but the project still has a way to go to reach what you would call a "technical preview".
# The Team
Project: Lakewood is currently under active development by the following people, in no particular order. Please note some people are using pseudonyms or their online personas.
Lead Designer:
James Rollo
Designers:
Adam "El Baha"
Sound:
Johnathan "Chase" Pugh
James Rollo
Modeling:
No dedicated personnel at the moment.
Animation:
Evan Greene
Programmers:
Our programmer wishes to be anonymous until some personal things are taken care of.
Linux-Specific Programmer:
Adam "El Baha"
Level Designers:
Jesse Fountain
Johnathan "Chase" Pugh
James Rollo
Writers:
James Rollo
Johnathan "Chase" Pugh
Chelsea Williams
We are still looking for an artist and modeler. If you would like to assist, you may send an email to crowbarstudios64@gmail.com in regards to doing contract work. Also, please note that this is a throwaway email account solely used for this purpose, any other forms of contact there will be filtered out and ignored.
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