Reflex is a competitive Arena FPS that combines modern tech with the speed, precision and freedom of a 90s shooter.
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1,150
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$81,321
pledged of $360,000 goal
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Reflex is a competitive Arena FPS that combines modern tech with the speed, precision and freedom of a 90s shooter.
About this project
We've spent the last year disregarding sleep, excitedly ranting to our friends and repeatedly draining our bank accounts to create our proof-of-concept. We've built a solid, modern engine entirely from scratch and our testers are having fun. We (and our players!) are ready to see Reflex ramp up to full time production.
Want to watch the smoother, prettier, 60fps version of our video? Download it here.
- Old School Gameplay - A return to fast paced, arcade FPS!
- Lots of game modes - 1v1, Team Deathmatch, Capture The Flag, Control, Arena, Juggernaut, Midair + more.
- Matchmaking - Quickly find games of any type or simply jump on a server with friends.
- In-game, multiplayer map editor - Build maps with friends then smear those friends across the walls.
- In-game replay editor - Easily create frag films and highlights.
- LAN support - Grab your computer, your friends and a case of something caffeinated and enjoy the lowest pings possible through a tangled mess of CAT cable.
- High Performance - Reflex uses a custom built engine targeting 120fps (and we don't cap framerates so melt your GPU if you want)
- Dedicated Servers - Run your own servers, with your own settings. Just one of our completely obvious features that should be in every game but for some reason isn't anymore!
- Responsive input - Input sampled 1000 times a second to provide an ultra smooth experience. If you miss, it's your fault, not ours.
- Bots - Advanced A.I built using the tricks, stats, strategy and spam binds of real players.
- Advanced spectator features - Multiview, casting overlays, on-screen live statistics, spectator vs spectator interaction.
- Statistics - Wins:Losses, per-weapon accuracy, kill/death ratio, player comparisons, heat maps, item control, attractive bar graphs.
- Steamworks - Friends, achievements, VoIP, player invites + more.
- Training and coaching - In game, step-by-step breakdowns with key-presses and timings.
- Classic single player and coop play - Fight through a campaign either or solo or cooperative with friends.
- Regional ladders - Concrete evidence of how much better you are than other people in your city, country or region.
- Team Tracking - Stalk your favorite teams and receive news, updates and invitations to watch their games live.
- Tournament hosting - Host your own tournaments between you and your friends.
- Custom ladders - Find out how you compare against your friends, school, work or fellow inmates.
- Clans - Create a clan, customize it's look, invite your friends, challenge other clans, compete in ladders, see how your clan ranks!
- Cosmetic customization - Melee weapons, armor, weapon skins, announcers, HUDs, taunts and sprays!
- Workshop - Thousands of community made maps and cosmetics (probably not including hats).
- Meat vs Machine - Fight off waves of computer controlled enemies, secure an area with your own AI minions and other fun and exciting things we haven't programmed yet.
Ben Darling has been working in the games industry for over 10 years with senior roles in Level Design, Environment Art, Lighting Artist and Technical Artist (shader writing, effects and pipeline assisting tools) on platforms including Xbox 360, PS3, PSP, Wii and PC, for publishers such as Activision, Microsoft, Nintendo, Sega, LucasArts and Konami.
Working across such a large variety of hardware over the years has made Ben very technically minded for how to squeeze out the most performance while maintaining high quality art.
Dave "newborn" Jones has been an active part of the Arena FPS scene since the release of QTest. He is mostly known for his involvement with the CPMA project but has also run game servers, hosted competitions, trained countless new players, provided endless hours of technical support, created and maintained community websites and learned a ton about what works in an Arena FPS, what doesn’t work in an Arena FPS and what the scene wants from an Arena FPS.
Phil Brown started working professionally in the games industry in 2004 and since then has successfully shipped over a dozen projects on a huge number of platforms including Nintendo DS, Nintendo 3DS, Nintendo Wii, Nintendo WiiU, Xbox 360, Playstation 2, Playstation 3, PC Windows and iOS. He has also worked as a Senior Software Engineer, delivering products across Windows, Linux and OSX. He is very technically minded, having written cross platform renderers, shaders, network code, player physics, pipeline tools, numerous user interfaces and ridiculous amounts of game code.
Our formula is simple -- An evolution of classic arena FPS gameplay incorporating new features, new tweaks, new gameplay and new community integration.
Working part time, we have already created a robust, modern game engine from scratch that already allows content creators such as mappers and movie makers to work their magic and players to jump online and happily turn each other into giblets.
We continue to have "quick 15 minute playtests" turn into 3 hour long free-for-all sessions because fancy features aside, Reflex is extremely fun to play!
Lawyers, Accountants, Taxes, Kickstarter Fees, Software Licenses, contract art, sound, animation and programming.
What’s left goes towards keeping our team fed and living indoors for the next 18+ months of development.
All money will directly contribute to long-term development and supporting the community through events such as developer sponsored tournaments.
Kickstarter gives us the means to work on Reflex full-time while still retaining complete creative control. This will allow us to focus on features like level editors, replay editors, responsive controls and solid framerates -- things that matter to gamers!
This is also why we don’t have any stretch goals for Reflex -- We don’t want to hold our features to ransom, instead we will be implementing, evolving and providing on-going support for all planned features as soon as we have the funds to do so.
Risks and challenges
The biggest challenge we face is expanding the playerbase beyond the current arena shooter scene and building a strong community full of casual players, competitive players, mappers, film makers, casters and event organizers. Many of those are already excited about Reflex -- the most challenging group by far is the casual players. Our design approach has always been to make Reflex more appealing to fresh players without compromising the core gameplay that is vital to an arena shooter and we're confident that features like advanced tutorials, no-think installation and matchmaking will help bring new players into the genre and keep them there. Even with no public build available and limited marketing, the attention and support Reflex has gotten from the gaming scene has left us confident we will be able to grow and maintain a strong playerbase.
We're also a small team taking on an ambitious project. While Reflex may be a leaner, tighter game than your average AAA FPS, there's still a lot of work involved -- such as having to build our engine entirely from the ground up because we were unable to find one that met our criteria for "lean and responsive". Fortunately, our time in the game development industry has forged a lot of connections with a lot of extremely talented programmers and artists who are already eager to help with the project.
We've spent the last 12 months building a proof of concept entirely from scratch, in our own spare time. This has been hugely successful and we're receiving extensive positive feedback. We are ready to take this to the next stage.
Learn about accountability on KickstarterFAQ
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Nope!
The release dates listed are our estimates for when we will be able to deliver the very final reward for that tier -- but you'll still get everything else as soon as it's ready.
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There's worse things to be compared to -- Quake kicks ass!
Most arena shooters are going to have a lot in common when it comes to weapons, movement and map design -- that's what makes them arena shooters. That said, there are plenty of new and unique gameplay features in Reflex. Some of them are already implemented, some of them are not.
We are building upon the incredible gameplay base that CPMA provides. No other arena game has been through as much discussion, testing and tweaking. We plan to continue that legacy while fixing long standing problems with weapons, knockback, replays and a hundred other things. CPMA set the benchmark for competitive features in an arena shooter and influenced the direction of many other games, including QuakeLive and we are confident Reflex can do the same again.
We also have tons non-gameplay features that have not been seen in any arena shooter to date. Things like our in-game map and replay editors are extremely powerful tools for community made content -- Reflex will never run out of quality maps to play. We also want to build a competitive platform that will rival the kind of support that Valve give their competitive community -- support that has been missing with any other arena game.
If we didn't feel like we could improve on the games that are already out there, we wouldn't be making Reflex.
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It may seem like a lot compared to other games on Kickstarter but it's a pretty modest budget by game development standards. Reflex is an ambitious project that will require full-time work from the core team and help from some very experienced and talented freelancers. The reality is that this costs quite a bit of money.
A large chunk of that money also goes to people who are not us -- accountants, fees, taxes, licensing and other boring legal stuff. We've aimed to minimize these costs as much as possible but there's only so much that can be done.
We've also been asked why we didn't set a lower target and try and make up the remainder another way, or why we didn't just aim to fund 6 months of development. The answer is pretty simple -- we wouldn't have been able to promise our backers a game if we did.
There has already been some high profile cases of developers announcing "Oops. No more money. Game is cancelled" months after a Kickstarter has ended and this is something we want to avoid at all costs. Not only does it leave fans feeling like they wasted their money, it leaves them less inclined to fund future projects. This can be extremely damaging for independent game developers like ourselves.
We want to deliver everything we've promised and more and our Kickstarter target is how much it will take to do that.
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Sure do! Once you have your copy of the game, you'll receive every update to every version, free, forever. This applies from the very first prototype build to updates we hope to put our years after the game has been called "final".
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Yes, yes and no.
Initially, we'll be Windows only as we don't currently have the resources to develop and test on three platforms. The moment we do, we've already got some people lined up to take care of getting the game on anything that supports a mouse, keyboard and reasonably modern GPU.
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Unfortunately, we're unable to offer PayPal pledges until we are much closer to hitting our funding goal as PayPal charges are applied instantly and returning pledges made through PayPal would be both painful and expensive ;)
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Funding period
- (30 days)