23 Nov 2021 » Cybercafe of Broken Dreams

I found an old notebook with C-Dogs sketches during a move, and thought it would be fun to share, given that I’ve moved on from the project.

C-Dogs was one of my favourite games, so when I got into game dev, it was one of the games I wanted to remake and improve upon. I started collecting ideas and sketches about what a sequel to C-Dogs would have.

The game would have new enemy designs, in a sci-fi, cyberpunk theme. C-Dogs had a great variety of campaigns (zombies, terrorists, orcs, bug-eyed monsters) but thematically it was all over the place. Returning it to a pure sci-fi theme meant cyborgs and robots, heavily-armoured mechs and mech suits. The fast-moving xenomorphs and zombies from C-Dogs were fun but in the new game, they would be replaced with fast-moving and sleek robots with sharp blades for melee weapons.

Gun design would be an important consideration; as C-Dogs is a shooting game, the guns are pretty important, and should be fun and satisfying to use. C-Dogs had an eclectic arsenal, with standard shotguns and machine guns, to sci-fi powerguns, gaming favourites like flamers, and well… the less said about the browny gun, the better. Not so in the new game, which would be filled with futuristic, high powered fish guns and pew-pew hand cannons. The MC’s - who is definitely a cyborg - weapon of choice would be an unassuming SMG, but packed with high-velocity rounds that would shred non-military opponents like cloth. Basically I took lots of notes while watching Ghost in the Shell.

Making plausible guns is one thing but making them legible in a top-down game - where the guns are tiny - would need a different approach. They should have strong silhouettes, so they are recognisable even when they’re a handful of pixels in size. Turns out you can do quite a lot with pixels.

The game would also have a coherent storyline. In addition to some frankly silly world-building, the campaign would be highly non-linear: the MC would be thrust into a world with multiple factions and sub-factions, each with their hidden agendas, and depending on which factions the MC is currently working for, the storyline will take different branches, with some levels being playable as a different side with different objectives. For example, work for a certain faction and you would play a level by destroying an objective. Work for a different faction and you would play the same level but guarding that objective.

Alas that’s the end of the story. C-Dogs SDL was certainly fun to work on but it is mostly an enhancement, with no sequels on the horizon. A lot of time has passed since these ideas, many of them were tried by other games, some quite successfully. I’d still like to see some of the unused ideas tried, perhaps in a future game I make. For example the idea of revisiting a level but played from a different perspective still seems cool. Starcraft 2 has a reversed campaign mod which looks fun as heck. Perhaps it’s not something practical for a large set-piece-design-driven organisation with siloed teams, to make a single level play well in different ways, but for a small team it can still be a neat way to reuse levels.

Anyway that’s enough from me. C-Dogs SDL isn’t quite dead - there’s a small update coming up soon 😉 - but you can also follow me on my future game dev adventures on my blog or itch.io. Happy gaming as always! 🎉

*[MC]: Main Character

12 Oct 2021 » C-Dogs 1.1.1 Released, Leaderboard Contest Extended!

Here’s a minor wolf3d-related release, which fixes support for some wolf3d mods as well as adding support for the Spear of Destiny mission packs!

Spear of Destiny is often sold together with two additional mission packs, which are supposed to be sequels to Spear of Destiny, but are not made by id Software and resembles fan modifications in quality. With this release, they are mostly* recreated in C-Dogs, so if you already own Spear of Destiny from Steam or GOG, you can try it out for free!

* Note: the wall textures, sprites and bosses are not fully recreated in C-Dogs. They still look like plain Wolfenstein 3D / Spear of Destiny.

In other news, the C-Dogs SDL / Wolfenstein 3D leaderboard contest has been extended to October 24th! Get your entries in for a chance to win prizes!

Finally, the WolfSource discord server has been kind enough to host a #cdogs-sdl channel! If you want to discuss anything C-Dogs and Wolf3D related, come on over: https://discord.gg/Fee7PBY

Downloads and release notes: https://github.com/cxong/cdogs-sdl/releases/tag/1.1.1

10 Sep 2021 » C-Dogs 1.1.0 Released and a Leaderboard Contest!

We’re running a C-Dogs SDL / Wolfenstein 3D leaderboard contest! Record your run of Wolfenstein 2D Episode 1, get a high score or speed run for a chance to win some prizes! 🎁🎁🎁

The competition ends at the end of September. For more details visit the competition page.

We also have a minor C-Dogs SDL release, which adds time taken to the end screens.

Downloads and release notes: https://github.com/cxong/cdogs-sdl/releases/tag/1.1.0

05 Sep 2021 » C-Dogs 1.0.2 Released!

The Wolfenstein 3D related goodies keep coming! We’ve gone through and tested a bunch of custom Wolf3D and Spear of Destiny mapsets, and fixed support for them. You can grab them all from the Campaign Dogs site!

Wolf3D has a long and lively modding community, so this is a significant amount of additional content. Quite a few custom mapsets span the whole 6-episode / 60-map limit, so it will take dozens of hours just to play through them all! Some modders got quite creative and stretched the Wolfenstein 3D engine to its limit, using tricks like “holowalls” in their maps, so some tweaking was necessary to get them working in C-Dogs SDL as well.

We hope you enjoy these new campaigns!

Downloads and release notes: https://github.com/cxong/cdogs-sdl/releases/tag/1.0.2

28 Aug 2021 » C-Dogs 1.0.1 Released, and Campaign Site!

We’ve had an amazing response to the 1.0 release last week! Thanks to all new and returning players for checking out C-Dogs 👏

As a few folks pointed out, attempting to run Wolfenstein from Windows Steam can crash the game. This release fixes that bug, as well as adding support for Linux Steam.

Last but not least, Zombie has set up a website for sharing C-Dogs campaigns, “Campaign Dogs”!

Here you can download, rate and share custom campaigns, as well as upload high score or speed runs!

Zombie runs the WolfSource / Wolf3D.net community, a big resource for Wolf3D modding. Please do check it out, especially considering that since C-Dogs SDL supports Wolf3D / Spear of Destiny, it also implicitly supports custom levels made for these games, so who knows … you might find a whole lot of new content available there!

If you want to be kept up to date, you can follow:

• @CDogsSDL for C-Dogs mapping and modding, and
• @wolf3dnews for Wolf3D related news

Downloads and release notes: https://github.com/cxong/cdogs-sdl/releases/tag/1.0.1