Liquidator Demo

Made with Unity 5.6.5.

Liquidator is a   90's-era Descent-clone, with dated graphics and a classic DOS-themed    aesthetic.  The player navigates the maze-like corridors of subterranean mines, whilst unlocking doors and  fending off a variety of enemies, in the process. 

 Similar to the original 1995 release from Parallax Software, the primary objective in Liquidator involves   locating and destroying each facility's reactor and then escaping the mine before the entire place explodes.

The Premise

As of 2068, Demeter Industries has fallen on hard financial times, due to insufficient profits reaped in the aftermath of substantial   investments in a large-scale    mining operation,   desigjned to    extract precious metals from the mantle beneath the earth's crust.

Now, the company's  precarious monetary situation has left the organization open to an impending hostile takeover at the behest of  a rival holding company. Logistical analysis confirms that the standard procedure of extracting personnel and implementing standard shut-down procedures will incur expenditures  which the company is unable to sustain.

As a result, Demeter's head of security, Heidi Nguyen, has outsourced certain duties to a particular    "freelancer" as a means of expediting a more "financially-sound alternative"  to depriving the company of its monetary burdens.

Under the guise of "Operation Redline", you embark upon your duties under the code-name of "Liquidator".  Your assignment    to penetrate the interiors of each mine, locate and destabilize the nuclear-powered generators, and then escape through one of the many available ventilation shafts before the entire place explodes.

Due to a variety of internal circumstances, employees within these facilities have already come to expect the impending moves from Demeter's security division, and thus have taken it upon themselves to hire a few "freelancers" of their own, not to mention deploying a few standard automatons which have been reconfigured for military usage.

Gameplay

Similar to games within the  Descent series, you pilot a hover craft with a host of weapons at your disposal , not to mention the ability to maneuver 360-degrees of orientation  in either direction.    Keys corresponding to certain colors are required to unlock particular doors, and various machinations will attempt to thwart your progress, every step of the way.

Once you have located the mine's generator, you are required to destroy it, upon which you are allocated a 30 second period to vacate the facility    before a meltdown occurs.

Controls:

Mouse-look	pitch/yaw
A / D	Strafe left/right
W / S	accelerate/decelerate
Q / E	Strafe down/up
Left mouse-button	fire primary weapon
Right mouse-button	fire homing missile
1	primary laser (weapon selection)
2	rotary cannon (weapon selection)
3	scorpion (weapon selection)
F1	first-person (cockpit) perspective
F2	third-person perspective
Esc	pause

Retro Features:

There are variety of components within the game which have been explicitly designed to emulate the characteristics and limitations of     DOS-based computer games  in   the 90s era, including the following:

• 320x200 resolution
• low-polygonal objects
• blocky, unfiltered textures
• low draw distances
• an old-fashioned MIDI-generated soundtrack
• pre-rendered sprites  representing various items and pick-ups
• limited frame-rate

   

Other Remarks:

At this point, Liquidator is still within the preliminary stages of the   prototype phase, and the game is still beset by a large number of bugs  and   innumerable components which are more than a little "rough around the edges", so to speak.

I'll be looking to update this demo on an ongoing basis, and hopefully most of the kinks will have been ironed out within a reasonable period of time.

updates in  version 1.01:

• pitch and yaw controls have been smoothed out
• fixed various collision detection issues

updates in  version 1.03:

• lateral rotation has been    reconfigured for local- as opposed to universal- orientation.
• auto-leveling incorporated
• fixed bug which had prevented repeat of briefing session.

updates in version 1.04:

• rockets added as secondary weapons.
• vertical-strafing enabled.

updates in version 1.05:

• third-person perspective added.

updates in version 1.08:

• rockets have been replaced with homing missiles.
• rudimentary baked lighting features added.
• fixed some control issues.

updates in version 1.09:

• slight revisions to  control and missile guidance system.

updates in version 1.1:

• second playable level
• new enemy type: rocket drone
• new enemy type:  KL-13 VTOL Fighter
• new enemy type: rocket turret
• new weapon type:  Scorpion Plasma Cannon
• improved control characteristics