Howdy! Let me introduce myself. I'm a middle age Spaniard and the project lead for Fistful of Frags, which I've been developing with the help from many people over the world for 7 years now. I'm a hobbyist coder/level designer, among other things, and I created and maintained this project alive during all these years because I could basically. There was no big incentive as its player base abandoned progressively. Then Steam came and everything changed.
The Steam standalone version you are playing now was created in five months and involved porting lot of old code to a new SDK, cleaning and re-coding certain features as they were clunky or poorly implemented in previous versions. The four (only) maps that are present were crafted or severy updated specifically for this version and the more deathmatch oriented gameplay it features. My only actual goal was to get FoF into Steam, as a tribute to a long and dear friend. I had no high hopes, no bullshit, I'm still shocked and hope to cope with it progressively.
Reception.
How to explain it. There were no marketing plans at all, not fancy press kit, no posts in social sites advertising the release. We had barely a minimal server capacity anticipated (around 200 slots), and I just contacted Valve the release day because the system wouldn't let me go live due some issue with pricing (meant for normal games). So it went live and servers went full immediately. That wasn't strange at all since the system gives you 1 million views on featured releases section (which translated in 0.9% clicks, by the way). Seems that it got traction thanks to some youtubers (primarily Jerma, as many of you like to mention) and word of mouth, without Steam's frontpage nobody would be playing now though. FoF 3.9 was featured by some known youtuber and it barely had any effect.
I also would like to thank many server owners out there that came to our rescue pretty quickly. All of you are a very important part for the success of a community based game like this one, in several ways.
Future plans.
I've been reading most of your bug reports, suggestions, reviews, etc. The mod needs some fixes right now, that's my priority. I'm just concerned about the fact that any update will render useless many unattended servers though, and therefore creating a new cascade of complains. So this needs to be done carefully.
This is a list of fixes/improvements being worked on right now:
- same team player collisions glitched
- optional blood splatter
- weapon selection panel issues (second page for primary weapons may not work, or panel can't be clicked sometimes)
- switch button for primary weapons should be more noticeable
- Mac issues as: very dark shader effect for iron sights, wrong death notice icons or health meter not updating
- map exploit fixes
- sawed shotgun shells visible with high FOV
- broken menu music (gets cut)
And some balancing too:
- carbine may result too effective in CQC: a slower reload and much worse hip accuracy will be tested for the upcoming time. It still will be a stock weapon for TDM.
After this upcoming update, I may start to work on a new game mode I call 'Gang Standoff'. I'm looking towards your feedback, if it isn't what most players want then I'll just think in some alternative plan.
Gang Standoff is a competitive mode where 4 teams of 5 players fight each other in small arenas. There's no respawn, and each round last no more than 30 seconds. It's team vs team of course, with 2 simultaneous matches happening. There are 4 asymmetric arenas per map, so each team plays 2 times in each arena, as defenders or attackers. If you want to know more or tell me your opinion, please go to this thread http://steamcommunity.com/app/265630/discussions/1/540741132021213789/
edit: forgot to mention player collisions