THE NARDIAH WALL – thousand-section fortress in the fabric of space-time itself…

Last remaining relic of a long-dead aetheric empire, constructed at its farthest frontier to confound forgotten foes.

Now, although some primitive defences remain, astral-dreaming jumpers – the deft – gather to race along its ruined walkways.

Read on for gameplay video and free download for Mac or Windows.

I’m proud to present my FPJ (first-person jumper), Deft, which has been in beta for a few months. Deft makes use of ghosts to allow online multiplayer play without requiring gamers to be online at the same time. This is a cunning technique, useful in sidestepping the conventional requirement that one builds up a community of players. The extended beta time was to allow for more levels to acquire initial recordholding ghosts.

First here’s a teaser vid; it is from a beta however, so certain things look a bit different (in particular ghosts are now translucent).

Controls:

- Configurable; default is WASD or cursor keys, with space to jump

- Press Escape in-game to pause/restart level/switch play mode/view the record ghost/return to lounge

- Jump-pads propel you in the direction you’re travelling when you land on them, and the faster you’re going when you hit one, the faster it sends you! Lost direction mid-air? Twist your body — it’s not your typical FPS jump

Download:

Download Windows build (7.7Mb RAR)
Download Mac build (13Mb ZIP)

NEEDS INTERWEB! FOR PLAY HINTS, SEE INCLUDED README!

Extra notes:

FINALLY – a new game release! Although I’ve got a couple of prototypes of various things kicking around, I haven’t actually released a new game since Tomb of The Aztecs last summer. But the cold, lonely winter nights proved fruitful, and this is another one I’m quite happy with.

I was specifically trying to appeal simultaneously to casual and hardcore gamers. The objective is simple — get to the next milecastle along the wall, as quickly as you can, using the environment to your advantage. The gameplay is very pure and skill-based; the jump control is rather unorthodox and requires some practice to achieve optimal performance. However a rank beginner can join in instantly and have a lot of fun, and actually set some records thanks to the rather vast domain space, more on which in a moment.

You can play in either Campaign mode, where you warp to a different level randomly every time you complete one (even if you don’t get a record), or Obsessive mode, repeating the same section of wall to try and beat the current record.

If you should fall to your death, or get hit by a laser, you’ll see a red deathghost tracing your previous route when you retry the level.

Each level can have a record set for completing it. When you see a purple ghost, it’s the ghost of the current record holder for the level. Beat their time, or set a first record on a previously unexplored level, and your own ghost will be uploaded for others to race against.

Turqoise ghosts are the ghosts of previous record holders, since beaten by the current record holding ghost.

Thanks to my tireless (read: hopelessly addicted – it does that) beta jumpers, here are now ghosts on some 60% of the 1001 levels, so I figure it’s time to release the thing. Hang on a second – 1001 levels?! Yep, I kid you not — each one lovingly, individually designed and top-secret fractal compression then applied. OH ALRIGHT – they’re procedural, inspired by my heroes David Braban and Ian Bell

It has other nice tech in there, too. MySQL and PHP on the serverside, automatic version checking, in-game “Deft Web News”, and so on.  Building with the Unity engine, which reminds me of a modern Torque in many ways, so many nuts and bolts are taken care of that I was able to spend more time than usual on polish and implementing nice-to-haves.

I’d always wanted to do something cel shaded too, and this was the first game where it really made sense for me to do it. Modelling was done in good old Wings 3D.

As ever, feedback is most gratefully received.