Golgotha (computer game)
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| Golgotha | |
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| Developer(s) | Crack dot Com |
| Publisher(s) | undecided (Windows), Red Hat (Linux) |
| Distributor(s) | Telstar Electronic Studios (Europe) |
| Designer(s) | Dave D. Taylor, Jonathan Clark |
| Engine | Golgotha engine |
| Release date(s) | Unreleased |
| Genre(s) | First-person shooter, Real-time strategy |
| Mode(s) | Single player |
| Platform(s) | Microsoft Windows, Linux |
| Input | Keyboard and mouse |
Golgotha was a computer game that was being developed by Crack dot Com prior to shutting down.
The game was originally meant to be a real time strategy game, with elements from first-person shooter games. Specifically, the game was meant to be "Doom meets Command & Conquer."
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[edit] Demo 5c
The last released demo, version number 5c, was playable in Windows. It supported both software rendering and 3dfx Glide-based 3D cards. The demo included two levels, one based on Switzerland and one based on Cairo. The Switzerland demo level was the more complete one. In addition to this, the demo also had a non-interactive demo level that showed the terrain rendering capabilities of the graphics engine.
In the demo, the gameplay worked in the following fashion. The player controlled a super-tank, which can be driven in first-person mode. In third-person mode, the player is presented with a bird's-eye view of the battlefield, and can command squads of individual units. The object of the level is to secure the enemy base and move any unit capable of taking over enemy bases to the "takeover pad" in the base.
[edit] Near the release
However, around the time the company folded, the gameplay had several issues: Basically, there was no way to control squads any more; grand-scale strategy was limited to choosing path for the produced units to follow. This didn't allow for much variation in gameplay. Also, many AI issues had not been ironed out.
(This is Dave Taylor writing the following- I don't know how Wikipedia works- so I'm hoping someone edits this to read more professionally, but I was genuinely surprised to find Golgotha in here, and I miss the team, the game, the plot, and the gameplay mechanic, so I thought I'd splain how this all went down a little more clearly)
Though originally inspired by Command & Conquer, we aborted a traditional RTS format because the team and budget were proving to be ill-suited to solving the problem. As I would learn later, pathsolving and routing is famous for bringing an RTS team to its knees, and this is what was proving problematic, so rather than suffer, we pulled the kill chain on this to adopt a simpler gameplay mechanic.
We also did this on Abuse, which was originally called Alien Grue and was to feature a very challenging-to-develop melee combat mechanic, and the enemies were to be trained by a neural net (which was working, but not well), with a plot written by Stephen R. Donaldson (which was hilarious, but which demanded too many new art assets and changing gameplay mechanics). All this proved to be too difficult to wrangle for a 3-man team, so we killed it and took the assets and threw together a simple Mario-meets-Robotron gameplay mechanic.
The removed squad control in Golgotha was intentional. We tossed C&C as the inspiration and embraced Rescue Raiders, bringing it from a 1.5D RTS/action hybrid to a 2.5D RTS/action hybrid. In the new version of Golgotha, you controlled a supertank, which was a serious load on the player's attention, making it very much a twitchy action game. So squad control was reduced to picking a path, then queing a rock-paper-scissors-ish sequence of baddies, so that you could quickly return to control of your supertank. Bit o trivia: The armaments on the supertank match the helicopter on Rescue Raiders almost perfectly, lots of machine gun rounds, a dozenish main gun rounds (bombs in Rescue Raiders), and only 2 guided missiles.
This dramatically improved the gameplay mechanics. AI for the opposing supertank was still wobbly and posed another notoriously challenging problem, but it was far easier than the pathsolving/routing problem and a much better fit for the team. However, about the time we had finally settled on this, we had burned through our cash from Abuse, in addition to a little dough from AMD for 3DNow optimizations and a gracious gift from Richard Garriott, and though we had an offer on the table to fund the rest of the game, I was at the time too proud to let someone else foot the bill, thinking that they would ruin it. In retrospect, I should have grown a spinal cord and coped. We released the assets to the public domain so that we could ride the resulting press release to other jobs.
[edit] Ultimate fate
The unfinished game's assets were released to public domain. This included source code, game data, textures and music, some of which have been later recycled into other games.
After the release, some volunteers started working on the game code, but the interest died down.
[edit] External links and references
- "So long, Crack.com" - by Jonathan Clark, Golgotha programmer
- Crack dot Com's Golgotha website (last archived version of the site prior to bankruptcy), through the Internet Archive
