Level 2 of NTKS is the entirety of the original Kshatriya Prologue, remade in source, but played from the eyes of Isaac, the character you are chasing after in the original. The following is a (nearly) "direct comparison" of all the shared areas. Source version on top, FPSC version on the bottom. These are imgur links so you can view them more closely.
I took some artistic liberties with the map this time because I was looking to improve it, and make it feel more "NT°" and not to exactly recreate the original. As such a lot of the original geometry has been resized to get a more cramped and "Kowloon Walled City in 2055" type of vibe. I also wanted to rely much less on clipping large areas with little detail to pitch black to hide FPSC's limitations, and instead use source's nice radiosity to bleead lightcolors around and make the place a bit more vibrant. I like to think it's just as depressing but I try to do that more with visual storytelling and mapscripting now while having a world that is just a little more inviting to get lost in aesthetically with more harmonious color interactions. (hopefully)
I basically made what I always wanted prologue to look like, but maybe you'll like the original oldschool look better!
I look forward to the community's opinions. I apologize for the lack of updates, this one map has been my project for the last year. I'm sure I have created at least 100 new assets or textures for this one, or at least remastered something from my old FPSC/GG library and gave it a better texture/shaders.
We will go level by level, starting with:
Level 1:
Next, Level 2:
and finally, Level 3
P.S.
I was really excited to be able to fit 3 FPSC levels into a single source map with a lot of room to spare. I was able to widen the whole world and create a lot of extra explorable areas to cater to the parkour/climbing/walljumping that couldn't previously be accessed and add a bit of replayability hopefully. Here are some pictures of areas in level 2 with no comparison. All these and the original comparison shots (no comparisons) can be seen in the images section.
Thanks for your patience with this project (and this super long article) so far. It is still a very small hobbyist indie project, and the friends working on it are all employed full-time in the creative industry so there's often very little inspiration left at the end of a long workday to devote to this project from all sides. Still, It will continue until it is finished, no matter how slow.
If you haven't played it, and you have patience for a little bit of "amateur game designer" jank, I urge you to play the other Kshatriya episodes available in the files section. Both episodes will shed some light on the plot, as all episodes are part of the "Kshatriya Universe"
This looks AMAZING MAN, congratulations! But moving to UE4 or even UE5 isn't better?
I appreciate your comment, I just like the process of using the source engine better. I have experience animating and working with UE for commercial projects and I have found it to be bloated, user unfriendly, an uninviting UI, and generally having too much feature functionality to be reasonably understood by a solo dev with no programming experience like myself.
coming from FPS creator, I was always looking for a tool where I could make a fun single player FPS game with no coding (and no spending hundreds of dollars on game templates in an asset store)
I was also never a big fan of setting up logic with spaghetti nodes or "blueprints" as they are called. source's IO is much better.
Lastly, for whatever reason, I've always enjoyed the look more from source games than from unreal. it seems like source, despite graphical limitations, creates an image with a "realistic" style, where as most UE stuff I see falls beyond into the "hyperreal" category.
So, personal tastes
So keep up the good work my friend, you are a very talented developer. I am "Goldeneye 007" user from the old TGC Forums, I am friend of the legendary FPS Creator user Wolf, I even joined FPSC server on discord recently. I know of your game from the times of FPS Creator, and I even played it. I was always amazed by all the stuff you did with FPS Creator. Cheers!
Nice, wolf is someone I'd consider one of my best friends, and he is the voice actor for katsu on this game :)
Utterly phenomenal. This looks like the neotokyo singleplayer we never got.
Thank you! That's what I'm hoping it will be, at least it is for me already, though fair warning, a lot of the "tactical shooter" elements loved by NT fans are not present here. The world, lore and aesthetic is very NEOTOKYO, but the gameplay's more similar to the previous episodes in the Kshatriya series, though much more polished and running at triple the frame rate, with 99.99% less crashes.
Looks phenomenal! ^,^
I'm shocked this is Source 2007, some of those screens look photorealistic
Incredible job
This is source 2013/mapbase/some of our own custom code
Hello, are you still working on this awesome project ?