About

FlickFrag is a shooter for Windows. You pick one of three guns, you walk into a map and you fight bots or your friends. It is an alpha right now, which means about half of it is done. It is free.

One person makes it. No ready-made game engine is used: the window, the graphics, the sound, the physics and the bots were each written by hand. The aim is not a big game but a small finished one. A few maps, a few weapons, a few modes, and one day a release on Steam.

What it has now

The game opens on a menu. You can play on your own or invite a friend.

Guns. There is one rifle and two handguns. The rifle is on key 1, the handguns on keys 2 and 3. There is a grenade too: it bounces on the floor, it rolls, and your ears ring if it goes off near you. The sound, the kick and the sights of each gun were worked on one by one. The guns come with twenty skins, and the Insert key walks through them.

Maps. Three of them: Arena is indoors and tight, Open Field is a hundred and twenty metres of ground, and the Range is for practising your aim on your own. There are two modes: Team Deathmatch and Rounds.

Bots. Eight bots fight you. They see you, they hear your footsteps and your shots, they look towards the noise, they take cover, and they come looking when they lose you. They can be set from easy to hard.

A match. Four against four. You and three bots on the blue team, four bots on the red team. First to thirty wins. When you die you come back at your own base two and a half seconds later. You cannot shoot your own team.

Playing with a friend. One of you presses Create Room and sends the number on the screen. The other types that number in and joins. No address to look up, no account to make. There is a chat line inside the room for typing to each other.

On screen. Everyone in the room has a body you can see. The dead drop to the floor. When you die the camera goes down with you and looks at whoever got you. You get a scoreboard, a list of who shot whom with which gun, and hit marks. Gunshots, footsteps and falling cases come from the direction they happen in.

Settings. You can change the sound, the mouse speed, the keys, the picture and the colour and thickness of the crosshair. The quote key opens a command line that reaches everything else. The game speaks English and Turkish.

What it does not have yet

The lighting and the shadows are still simple. Bots do not throw grenades. You cannot pick what your character wears. When the person who made the room leaves, the match ends.

Talking over a microphone is written but it is not reliable yet: in some rooms the voice channel never opens at all. If it does not open the room is still made and the match plays normally, only nobody hears anybody. Typing always works.

None of that is a surprise, it is just the order of the work. That is what the word alpha means.

The order of the work

1. Do the guns properly. Three guns and the grenade, all with the same care. This is where the project is now.
2. Keep the room alive. When the person who made it leaves, someone else should take over.
3. Make the microphone actually work.
4. More maps and more weapons.
5. Steam. A store page and a price.

Nothing on that list has a date. It is an order, not a calendar.