Front Line Zero

An Unreal Engine 4 cyberpunk rail-shooter indie game inspired by Rez.

History

Front Line Zero is a video game project started in late 2017 by the London-based company METATEK.

Founded by Dan Carter, VFX artist and Houdini specialist, the company's goal is to provide and promote novel audio-visual sensory experiences through the use of new technologies.

Greatly inspired by games such as Rez, Child of Eden or Thumper, that put the music and sound effects to the core of gameplay, I decided to join the team to work on the audioreactive game project Front Line Zero (code named XAO at first, found the final name myself).

The game is meant to be composed of ten rail-shooter levels with an emphasis on firing your weapons in sync with the rhythm of the music. Each interaction yielding a different procedural sound using a custom MIDI track for each level, it makes the creation of original melodies a core part of the gameplay experience.

Much like predecessors like Rez, each level is also going to embody a different variation on the game concepts, with a unique visual style and mechanics you need to defeat to complete the level.

To this day, Front Line Zero is still in active development.

Contributions

Across the years, this project became very personal for me as I had a far-reaching influence on most steps of the development.

• I'm in charge of the "systems administration" part of the project, dealing with hosting a dedicated Linux VPS at OVH to provide the team with a working Git+Git LFS repository, plugged in to a private Gitea server (our very own Github !) to help monitor the progress and write documentation on the project's wiki.

• I developed in Unreal Engine, with C++, most of the game systems like character movement components (both spline-based and procedural), editor tools for the designers to be more efficient in their work, and more gameplay code like weapons, powerups, and enemy behaviors (FSM-driven AIs).

• I helped with almost all aspects of core game design, ranging from the player's weapons and main enemy types to designing entire boss fights, coming up with fight sequences and victory conditions in detail. A lot of the design process of a rail-shooter is to always bring something new for the player not to get bored, so a lot of creativity has to be put in that process.

• I wrote most of the narrative of the game, including main story events, some character dialogues, character backstories and most of the lore of the game's fictional universe.

In general, most of our designs, work documents and source code are private. If you would like to have a sample of what I produced for the game, feel free to reach out to me by email or any other platform and I'll try to fulfill your request.

Screenshots

Links

If you would like to know more :

• Front Line Zero website : http://www.frontlinezero.com

• Metatek website : http://www.metatek.ninja/

• Metatek Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/metatek.io/

• Metatek Twitter : https://twitter.com/metatek