Hi there! It's been a while since our last major update, hasn't it? Rest assured we've been hard at work. While we realize we've kept you waiting on a bit of a sour note, the team needed the time to get back on track with Deluge. Today we'll be showing you a glimpse of our progress, and alongside that we'll be releasing another big update soon! More on that at the end.
Over the last few months the team has been restructuring the game, making sure every piece of the puzzle falls into place. Since it can be tedious we've indulged ourselves with some of the more fun activities in the process, like touching up the weapons and even completely overhauling some of them!
Anyone who's worked with GZDoom knows how painful it can be to make high quality weapon animations. To make it easier on ourselves we've been prototyping a solution to bring down the average time spent on animating. Our first experiment was the Railgun. We felt its animations were too stiff and could be made more dynamic. With surprisingly little effort, we got the following result:
Seeing how well it turned out, we got to work. With Boondorl's new animation system and Pops' sprite work, we decided to polish up the rifle and breathe some life into it. Featuring a new buttery-smooth firing animation, randomized muzzle flashes, and bullet casings for extra detail. Here it is in action:
While we're proud of the result, there's still a lot of work to be done. We've got some exciting new features planned for the arsenal of Deluge. Expect to hear more about that in the near future.
Speaking of the near future, we're itching to show off what we've been doing over the past few months. Let's just say that Bacillus City has been getting a fresh coat of paint. And maybe some new areas to explore? Keep an eye out for that in the following weeks and be sure to let us know what you think.
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Heard about a bunch of weird drama surrounding this mod recently. It looks dope though so hopefully you all can work through whatever issues there might be to actually get it released one of these days.
What kind of drama are we talking about?
Interpersonal issues between the people working on the mod that resulted in the de facto "leader" quitting the project who then dumped like around 13GB of source files for the work done on the project up to that point online. The remaining members then wrested control of the Moddb and ZDoom forum topics from them in the aftermath of this. It kind of looked a little bit like a hostile-takeover watching from the outside, though I can't say I know definitively what exactly happened. I'm not sure about the minutia of exactly why or how it all went down, I'm just aware of the general overview in a "I heard it from a friend of a friend" sort of way.
Hey, as one of the project leads I wanted to clarify some things about what happened. The team feels that enough time has passed to give out more details. First, some of the facts. Deluge itself was not a creation of Smokey, but of our art director Andras. It was a map he originally made for Sven Co-op that he wanted to expand on in GZDoom. It's worth noting he had been trying to do this by himself as early as 2014 until the current team was assembled back in 2019. Smokey joined and was acting as a stand-in lead for the project since Andras was busy with some of his other works. Given the size of the team at the time Smokey would set up the Discord himself and put the project on forums under his name. It wouldn't be until a few years later that Floodgate Arts would form and things would be shifted over.
To be frank, the account shifts needed to happen regardless. The ModDB page had already successfully been moved off of Smokey's main account and over to the game dev group. They would need to be shifted over on other forums to make sure no single person had full control over the social medias (in case some kind of falling out happened). This ended up being a problem because Smokey set up all the team accounts and then silently refused to give access to anyone else, including our community manager. There was some attitude given about it in the Discord server, but for the most part no one said anything and let it slide.
It wasn't until the week before he was kicked from the team that things got really bad. Smokey's leadership skills had always been questionable as his communications became more and more distant. He stopped attending vocal meetings and would do disruptive things like randomly kick people from the voice chat while in said meetings. At one point he ended up completely locking the meeting channel, forcing us into the public channel to wait for him to unlock it. His response was to then kick everyone from the public channel and lock it. No one else had permissions at the time on the server so everyone was completely locked out of both voice chats. I should stress that these vocal meetings were critical for Deluge's progress as most of the direction-based work would get done in them.
The rest of the team began to discuss what to do. It was clear Smokey couldn't handle the responsibility of leadership so we decided originally that he would get to stay so long as he relinquished the role and gave it back to Andras. This was futile as he ended up ignoring attempts to contact him. His DMs were completely closed and he wouldn't respond to anyone on the server itself. One member tried to get his attention by ping spamming his handle to which that member was then instantly removed from the team with no discussions with the rest of us. On top of this we saw him active on other servers so we knew for a fact he was ghosting us. These ultimately lead to the decision to remove him from the team. We created a letter signed on behalf of the whole team and sent by Andras asking him to step down. We explicitly outlined in the letter what behaviors were the cause of his removal and gave him a list of demands to hand over the social medias. Within an hour he deleted all of them and started posting builds of the game. These leaked builds were what led to him getting banned on ModDB and ZDoom as this violates both sites' terms of service. We had no intentions whatsoever of him being banned from any sites. That was entirely his own doing.
To speak personally and not on behalf of the rest of the team, I was disappointed with Smokey's leadership. He gave very little communication and direction to the team and it seems most discussions he had were done entirely in DMs. He was extremely slow to act on feedback to the point where it seemed he was ignoring it and this led to many issues like poor optimization, design flaws, and a story no one on the team liked. He would make huge decisions for the campaign without informing anyone until he had already done it. His recent overhaul was a massive problem since it would easily delay the project by roughly 6 months when we had already agreed on release dates months beforehand. All of us let this go unchallenged for the most part and continued to silently work away. We have no idea what “power struggle” he was referring to as the only real issues with his leadership were within the final week before his removal. He just wasn't right for the role, and his response to the event he created in the week before his removal and shortly after made that abundantly clear.
It's good to have a more thorough understanding of it, but my main concern as an outsider is not wanting to see all of the amazing work you have all put into this project up till now go to waste. I can't say how it actually plays, because I haven't played it, but the environmental detail and general vibe are really incredible stuff. Like I said in my original comment, whatever issues there might be (or might have been) I just really hope to see this project come to the light of day eventually and not disappear into the "ambitious mod black hole" like so many other long-term high-quality/high-skill projects have done before. I know from experience how shaky the foundations of unpaid indie projects that require regular commitment from a number of strangers spread around the world can be and know that sudden changes or problems with leadership can be the death of some projects. I'm glad to see/hear though that the Deluge team seems to be pulling it together and continuing to put in the work in spite of the setbacks.
Why is this mod named after a torrent client