Crusader 3 At Home

Desert-Mammoth

Desert-Mammoth

Member
I've spent the last few weeks piecing together a sort of regressed version of Crusader; initially because I was making my own "engine" within Godot for a top down shooter, but I always loved Crusader's janky control scheme so the project started with me emulating that... and then things kind of snowballed.

What I've got is the first mission of Crusader No Retreat, my headcanon third installment of the series. Its presented as a simple top down shooter, almost like looking down at a game board with character tokens, but I've managed to import a great deal of Crusader's DNA into the mix and honestly I think it plays really quite well if you can get past the aesthetics of the situation. My mantra was sort of "If I nail the movement and vibe, everything will follow" and I think i've done okay in that regard.

The beauty of what I'm building is that it's going to allow me to add features Crusader never had, such as recruitable companions and vehicles.

Story starts 30 years after the end of No Regret, and given that I'm planning on turning this into a full ten mission campaign I don't want to spoil anything, I'll say that the Silencer broke with the resistance over some issues and during the intervening years the WEC was able to get the upperhand, and now the planet is torn by a global civil war. An incident brings him back into the fold, and that's about that.

In any case I have a lot of the systems in place now; I've designed the game to use mask layers for maps which makes level creation very easy, and all I need to do is basically keep wiring in more and more features. Still a fair lot of work to do, but its much more fun than trying to untangle the Silencer's 2000 animation frames in an attempt to reverse engineer the original.

So er yeah, I guess if you wanna check it out then here's a link to what I've got. Apologies for the video quality, I made the game for 4:3 and OBS had a bit of a tantrum over it. This is obviously just a personal project for my own enjoyment but I also wanted to remind people that original Crusader content is still being made in 2026 :D

 
And just a little work on eye balling Crusader itself. I have pretty much got the Silencer moving, rolling, sprinting, firing, and the guard as well.

Hasn't been easy, this game is really held together by jank. You'll notice for example the guard jiggles when he fires, that's because they didn't centre their sprites and instead manually offset them to account the size difference - the mad lads. So I either have to recentre them all myself manually, or try and guess the offset and automate it that way.

My goal really is though: Make a room with intractable objects and dangerous guards that can be killled. If I make that, well, I've remade 80% of the game :D

 
Successfully mapped the Silencer's hands which will be important for getting all the guns into play.

Wiring up remaining pistol animations, such as the strafe, back step and crouch then:

Wiring up the guard's death animations, implementing the basic shooting system, a basic guard A.I and then simulating a basic fire fight
 
Keenan said:
WOW.
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Yeah man, we're going to attack this thing on two fronts. Original fresh Crusader content built as a top down shooter, and a reverse engineered (eye balled anyhow) Crusader. I'm not clever, there are some real geniuses on this forum, but I'm a bit of a Rocky Balboa character - like I can just keep going once I got my mind set to something.

Spent 6 hours today just aligning the Silencer's movements in Godot with the movements in No Remorse. We're there, pretty much.

Just added collision to the barrels and large gas canisters, now figuring out a height system to determine how shots land.

Got a nice pipeline set up for resolving animation issues. There are some minor glitches (a lot of guess work into figuring out how they measured things and its starting to feel like they eye balled a lot of things themselves), but on the whole we're advancing at pace.

Hope to have the firefight demo done today, and then from there its rigging the barrels and gas canisters up to explode, implementing a procedural map generator, and you boys can check my handiwork personally.
 
Gentlemen, there has been a situation.

- Shooting system
- Guard A.I
- Collisions
- Sounds
- Silencer can roll, jump, side step, back step, forward step, walk, sprint
- Second Silencer recoloured to test the viability of recolouring actors to create more enemy types and also to explore the possibility of friendly A.I

Next up:

- Procedural map generation

Once I have the architecture in place for that, it becomes a matter of layering more and more systems on top. Switches, inventory, keycards, teleporters, you know it, I'll add it.

 

We continue to win at an increasing pace.

Procedural map generator is active. Barrels explode, gas tanks explode, guards are spawning and patrolling, we have a functional inventory system, a search and interact system, lootable corpses, and A.I companion you can switch with and order to hold or follow and who engages enemy guards.

Still some jank in the Silencer's movements but we're ironing out the worst of the creases as we go.
 
Ran into a bit of an issue trying to get doors to work, or rather, trying to get the generator to use them correctly. After about six hours of banging my head against a wall, I'm switching over to No Retreat to work on Bravo Sector and the inter map mission activities.
 
No Retreat Updates

- Bravo Sector mask, overlay and wall overlay completed.
- New procedural computer object created and added to mask layers
- New spark/electrical hit indicators on industrial equipment (orange sparks) and computer objects (blue sparks)
- Bravo Sector character manifest created, characters plotted

Next steps:

- Create artwork for character tokens and dialogue portraits
- Create dialogue system
- Write dialogue scripts
- Create weapon store
- Create health and shield upgrade stores
- Create greeting audio for all named characters

Reverse Engineering Updates

- Switching from 2D environment to 3D environment to test ordering and collisions viability; if successful, will solve a lot of problems I keep running into. If unsuccessful, will need to think again about how the game world is ordered in 2D.

- Switched to PSX "run and gun" move style via toggle with D. Makes the Silencer quicker and snappier, always preferred the PSX controls tbh.

Reverse Engineering Updates #2

- Switching to 3D solved some issues, created others. Test room saved for possible exploration if the main project hits a barrier. 2D engine back in play.

- Doors are now working in 2D, along with switches. Thank the dear God, that was incredibly annoying. Long story short, doors are made up of about 12 sprites and all of them have to be fitted together in engine to avoid problems. This was beyond me, so I diverted to assembling them in full and then importing them, which created collision and clipping issues difficult to resolve. With a bit of screaming and hair pulling, we were able to fix this.

- The door fix has thrown the height and collision system I had engineered into complete disarray and we're now back a the drawing board deciding the best way to get this thing moving. I expect we'll solve it one way or the other within a 24 hour window, and then its back to grinding ever forwards.


Reverse Engineering Updates #3

- Epic Dragon Ball Z style fight with walls that separate walking surfaces and door frames finally resolved so that the Silencer no longer gets buried or clips through in the all the wrong places. Massive because its the basic architecture for how I handle similar problems.

- Currently returning normal one sided walls back to sanity.

- Once the walls are fine, we have to rework the prop system to make sure they're not clipping improperly.

- After that we can bring the map generator back online, and begin layering on more objects and systems.
 
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Keenan said:
I'm basically speechless.
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Admittedly I've hit a bit of a spiral, fighting with the depth management (the thing that controls what overlaps the Silencer and what doesn't and when), which was fine until I tried to add doors. I'm not entirely sure how the original devs did it, as the traditional approach hasn't worked so I spent a day or two trying different forms of black magic. I eventually got it to work (by triggering the Y layers when the Silencer passes the threshold), but this ended up breaking the map generator.

I've had to step back a bit and re-evaluate my approach. It might be that I have to do away with some types of doors, and rely on the type that sink into the floor rather than slide to the side. Survivable but below expectations.

The next days will basically be me adjusting things, then trying to fix whatever those adjustments break in the map generator. That's why I haven't made any further updates because it would basically just be me saying "I broke this then fixed it, then I broke something else and fixed that, then something else broke" etc etc lol.

The ultimate aim for build 1.0 is to basically press play -> dump player into a semi-decent looking map that has a respectable run time and functioning systems. Will keep you posted on that front.

No Retreat meanwhile continues to develop alongside the reverse engineering project, and I'll share more on that once the pieces come together. Its much easier to build of course but its also mostly hand crafted so all the script writing and assets are a big time sink.

But all in all, this wont be another dead project on the forum. We're going all the way no matter the cost.

Edit: Good news, I've resolved all of the issues. just need to re-attach switches to doors and hope nothing blows up.

Edit 2: Doors working, switches, working, collision system reworked for objects and walls, EVERYTHING is working as it should. We are winning.

Next steps: Introducing sanity to the procedural prop spawning system. Gas tanks against walls, crates and barrels in the room, computers and desks against walls, lockers and vending machines against walls etc etc, try to get the generator to produce a realistic environment.

Massive win today, tomorrow promises further developments and probably an update video.
 
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Still here. Still working. Still enjoying success. Completely solved the wall clipping issue and depth sorting, the game is working as it should and getting more Crusader-y by the hour.

I have introduced sorting logic into the map generator, so items are spawning in more appropriate places. We've also done a load of work on object behaviour and ballistics.

Next steps are to add a second floor colour so we can break up the monotony of the concrete, then a bunch more objects, just to get the map feeling proper and professional.

Once that's done, we're looking at keycard doors and intractable computers.

Additional weapons are going to be a pain, because there's several of them, 16 facings x 6 animation frames x 8 different animation families = 300 years of work without knowing what offsets the original team used (I had to align the pistol manually for every frame of all the pistol-related animations including back stepping, side stepping, crouched idle, standing idle etc etc)

Therefore we're probably going to align even more with the PSX version, which seems to have used the grenade launcher sprite as a catch all for all the weapons.

Working against me is that its the kids' Summer Holidays starting tomorrow so my free time is about to get knee capped. I will still be active just... not six hours a day active.

In any case, proof of life, sorry for no video:

1784768546260.png1784768616110.png1784768591326.png
 
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Okay so quite a good day today, with the clipping issue and wall placement finally resolved, I was able to storm ahead on several fronts. A lot of work went into the map generator today, increasing its sophistication.

We now have stackable crates and barrels, chain explosions, gas pipes and terminals etc etc which is nice.

Biggest change is that the map now has keycard progression and an end; essentially the generator sorts the map into 3 zones, each linked by a locked door with a corresponding keycard.

That is to say, Crusader is now a fully playable prototype with an end state. This is huge and I've come a lot further than I dared to hope, A.I assistance or no. The road has not been easy but it is becoming easier.

Next steps:

I need to refine the coding, we've got a lot of CPU bottle necks with regards to depth management and guard behaviour, and I need to resolve that first before I do anything else.

If I can crack that nut, the map size is going to triple and the guard numbers are going to equally climb so that we're left with an action packed and explosive experience.

Long term plans:

So at present my idea quite simply is to create a hub for the player who can venture out on randomly generated missions, collect credits, items etc etc, spend them at a shop and head back out again. Not a campaign as such, just something anyone can load up for a bit of randomised Crusader mayhem with a touch of progression. That's what the 1.0 release looks like, and I'm at 0.3 at the moment.

Anywho, video of the keycards and exit teleporter and stackable objects:


 
Little update:

So I've implemented the PSX two handed "one size fits all" mirrored grenade launcher to represent all two handed weapons. This is obviously a bit of a cheap work around but honestly the prospect of trying to actually get all guns showing up would have made for some very long and tedious days.

This completes the control alignment with the PSX version of Crusader. We are keeping the pistol animations in though so pistol weapons will be usable - interesting to note that even though there are weapon sprites for the various pistols, even the DOS version used the BA-40 to represent all pistols.

Aside from that, we resolved the guard a.i causing the game to meltdown, so now there's upwards of 50 guards on the map and we can go much higher.

As a side effect of me melding the grenade launcher with the Silencer sprite... we might have to ditch the second Silencer. That was always an experimental feature, but the recoloring method we're using is conflicting with the baked in muzzle flash. I might be able to work around this in time (separate muzzle flash) but for now we're a little stuck. I'll keep him in but he has random stripes of orange until I can think of a way of removing it... or we settle for dark green muzzle flashes, haha.
 
Update:

Few more additions today, such as loot chests and floor markings and pillars to cover the wall seams for the convex corners. Also refined the "back walls" after discovering the game used special sprites for it, so they're in play and things look a bit nicer for it.

We've tripled the map size and the number of guards, something like 105 of them walking about I think. It is quite cathartic mowing them down with the RP-22.

Today I am working on implementing security cameras, alarm beacons and alarm panels. If this goes well, I'll be able to use that same logic to implement wall miniguns as our first environmental hazard which will be nice.

If all of the above goes well, might drop another video to show the progress.

Edit: Also we all know that Crusader's maps are more than just static sprites. There's a lot of flashing and pulsing lights involved, I've so far ignored these for fear of breaking the map generator, but I am making my first inroads towards this now as I try to align my bastardization with the feel of the original.

Second Edit: Cameras are fully functional, alarm system is fully functional - and - wait for it - WE HAVE GLOWING SERVER WALLS or whatever they're supposed to be, the walls that look like the insides of a 1990's desktop tower. Figured out the OG trick, kinda. Was able to use this to illuminate alarm beacons, panels and power switches, so that's nice.

Next step: gatling gun turrets.
 
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CNR Revival 0.4

- Fully implemented the PSX RP-22 animations, mirrored east and west facings as in the PSX version. Grenade launcher used as a stand in for all weapons, as with the PSX version.
- Industrial floor markings added to the floor for rizz
- Functional cameras and global alarm system; guards spawn on camera edges when alarm is active.
- Map tripled in size; guard numbers stress testing at 105 count (probably too much to be fair for the final product, but fun at the moment!)
- Tightened object collisions and the ballistics manager so more things accidentally go boom
- Glowing props and walls as in the OG
- Lootable chests (animation needs work but its on the list)

Getting closer in alignment with No Remorse, which is my favourite of the two titles, and whilst I prefer the Dos version, I adore the PSX control scheme/snappy character handling, which is why we've got a bit of a frankenstein situation. I'm driving though so I get to choose which way we go ;)

Hopefully I'll get a public release together at some point in the near future so you guys can tell me how great or terrible it is. Personally I feel its come a long way, it feels like Crusader now, but refined in some areas, regressed in others. With each development cycle I'll be ironing out the creases and adding more and more features.

The biggest technical issue facing me now is that the map generator is doing so much we're looking at a 30-45 second load time on my mid tier gaming laptop from 2022, and I will expect that to rise as I introduce more stuff into the mix. I will eventually see what I can do to bring that down, but for now my philosophy is: build first, achieve stability, and then circle back and see if I can reduce it without breaking anything important.

 
Update:

Load times slashed from 45 seconds to 15 seconds so that was a nice outcome.

Next steps are:

- Introducing wall guns and stationary turrets (If I can find the blooming pedestal in the sea of art assets)
- Introducing the Roaming Susan as our first robotic enemy

Well there's part one:

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Gentlemen we continue to cook and cook well:

1785272222028.png

Next step is adding the terminal. The idea simply being that there'll be a terminal per zone, and hacking it will grant control of a random robot from across the map space, allowing the player to go ham if they choose. Obviously for a Susan that's not much help, but for the later models it'll be a lot of fun and hopefully make terminals a prize find in what is the Crusader Backrooms.
 
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