The Firefighter series is a short series of shooter-ish games that parody the superhero genre. It was my focus in 2016 and 2017, and where I experimented with a lot of new (or new to me) ideas, techniques, and technologies. There are two games in the series: Firefighter Simulator 2016/2017 and Firefighter VR+Touch. I had some more concepts in mind, but never developed them. It’s unlikely that those will ever be made, though some of the ideas will or have been used in other games, and the Outliers and Outsiders series is somewhat of a spiritual successor.
Firefighter Simulator 2017 (originally 2016) grew out of an idea I came up with while in the BCIT Game Dev Club. The prompt was “you’re almost a fire hazard” and somehow that turned into a firefighter super “hero” with the ability to set people on fire. It’s mostly a conventional FPS built on GZDoom, which I had a considerable amount of experience with and was one of my favourite tools at the time. It has a few interesting features: “offhand” fireball casting, Fallout 4 style 4-direction dialogue, doors that can be broken down, and fire that spreads. Although it’s extremely rough graphically because of my limited resources and abilities at the time, it has some of my favourite level design of any game I’ve made and is one of my most played games.
Firefighter VR+Touch is the sequel to Firefighter Simulator 2016/2017, following the same character in a new city. It features all-3D graphics (albeit mostly stock assets), voice acting, new fire mechanics and victims that can be carried around. It wasn’t the success I hoped for, mostly because I failed badly at marketing it though it also lacked direction in general, but has the distinction of being my only commercial game so far in addition to my first VR game and my first Unity game to see a release. Many of the technical lessons learned would go into the nascent Ascension III and what would eventually become CommonCore. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to play this game in VR now because it was made primarily for Google Daydream which is no longer supported.
Though not considered part of the Firefighter series proper, Tactical Weapons And Tactics is set in the same universe.