Design Challenge: Design a first-person shooter for the arcade halls

Because the Japanese never bothered to touch this genre with a ten-foot pole unless they were pandering to gaijins specifically. Let's see how well you can think outside of the box.

Write a short draft of a design document for a first-person shooter designed to be played on an arcade cabinet using a keyboard+mouse or lightgun setup. As it will be an arcade game, it needs to adhere to the following rules:

General arcade game guidelines:

For a loose frame of reference, you could use Devil Daggers.

Left 4 Dead but arcade.

Already exists

A pachinko game where you lose the mega jackpot and you start shooting up the pachinko parlor.

You shoot your cum at anime girls

Just take Serious Sam, add more power ups, turn the difficulty up and add a timer.
Get with the times old man
Even arcade games nowadays allow you to save progress.

I don't know about you anons, but those trips don't lie.

...

You are a priest fighting werewolves, vampires, and other nasty shit using your arsenal. The game begins at dusk, with some very casual shit going around. As the game gets further and further along, the amount of enemies and the degree of difficulty involved gets higher and higher.

Your beginning weapon is the Pistol, which is a pistol. It scores normal damage, but has unlimited ammo. You can pick up special cross-clips which can be equipped to any weapon, including the pistol, to make the bullets silver.

Later on you can pick up other standard things, like the Shotgun, Rifle, Rocket Launcher, Flamethrower, and Machine Gun, which all behave about as expected. You also get the Holy Water Gun, which shoots holy water; the Pile Bunker (pretty much the heaviest damage); and the Holy Sword (pseudo-melee; does massive damage up close, but also lets out slashes of light at short range; unlimited ammo). You can pick up grenades in the form of bottles of Holy Water or flaming oil.

Enemies:

Basic shit. They move very slowly. Take a few hits to kill, but the head is a weak spot.
Not as tough as Zombies, but very resistant to bullets. They fight using a sword and shield, meaning they can block the Holy Sword.
Like Skeletons, but with armor and better skill, making them super-tough. They can use their shields to block all damage.
Pop up from the ground behind you - a sound and weird white flashes on the screen is all that tells you they're here. No damage, but one touch causes paralysis. Slightly tougher than zombies. Silver does extra.
Big flesh golem. Like zombies, but much stronger and faster. Immune to holy and fire. One punch kills you. Use the rockets.
Tougher Skeleton Knights with magic fire-balls. They have a magic barrier which blocks all harm - Holy Water or a Holy Sword will dispel it, allowing them to be harmed. Silver does extra.
Immune to everything but silver. Very tough. Super fast. Hit very hard. Regenerate after death.
Immune to everything but silver, holy, and fire. Have a few magic spells. Drain huge amounts of life with a hit, healing themselves in the process. Slightly slower than Werewolves. Regenerate, but you can use a stake to keep them from coming back.

There are a few bosses as well, like the Giant Flesh Golem (appears at 8pm), the Barrow Lord (appears at 10pm), the Werewolf Leader (appears at midnight), and at the very end Dracula (appears at 4pm; only sunlight kills him, meaning you have to wait it out). Every hour reflects 10 minutes of play. There are different maps, with different enemies; the Snow Map spawns shape-shifting Draugr, as an example. Demons will also sometimes spawn, which are basically mini-bosses, and can only be killed with the Holy Sword.

Beating a full night means you get to get your High Score posted in the records. You can keep looping, with each night getting progressively harder. Bosses keep getting replaced, until on night six, you're dealing with the Dunwich Horror (it's invisible lol) and eventually Satan as the secret final boss (good luck faggot).

Oh, and speeds should be Unreal-tier.

Actual bullshit. It just never caught on.

It's already been done.

It's like if someone made a mod to turn HL2 into a parody of modern cinematic first-person shooters but then slapped it into an arcade cabinet

FPS in arcades existed since the 80's son.

And it can make money by having people purchase onaholes to use on it for obvious reasons.

That's a light gun / rail shooter, dumbass.

Which is probably the reason nobody wants to play FPS games in Arcades. Rail shooters do the job better in that environment.

It's strange how much this obscure arcade game released slightly after Wolfenstein 3D gets a lot of things right which just aren't as common in ensuing first-person shooters as they should have been. Nobody can mention an example of a good boss fight in a first-person shooter, and here's your reason.

Doom was a game built around testing your navigation and crowd control, not around fighting a single tough enemy at once, so when everybody copied Doom, attempts at boss fights were unnecessary and often crappy, it's something not even the Masters of Doom could get right. Further styles of first-person shooters were either puzzle-oriented with puzzle bosses who are shit by default, if you have to beat the boss by solving an abstraction rather than being tested on the skills you learned throughout the game, it's a waste of time unless the whole game is a puzzle game of sorts. Though anything past Doom didn't really do any good boss fights.

The reason why I'm hammering so much on boss fights is out of frustration that there's yet to be a singleplayer first-person shooter with gameplay deep and suitable enough to make a decent fucking boss fight (the exception being the Metroid Prime series maybe?), which is what a zillion sidescrolling action games can do just fine. Too many people take Doom and Quake as the pinnacle of the genre, but those are games designed around crowd control and facing multiple opponents at once in a variety of situations, with a weapon arsenal suited for crowd control. When the big boss in those games come up, you just use the most powerful weapon (usually the Rocket Launcher) until it fucking dies.

nuDoom actually has the best examples out of the genre because the bosses there challenge your movement through unique projectile attacks rather than having to solve an abstract puzzle or cower behind cover. However your aim goes practically unchallenged because of how large and easy the bosses are to hit, and once again you only use the most powerful weapons so it poorly tests you on using your entire arsenal, which you do have to do the rest of the game.

Back then there used to be different styles of platformers, the Apogee exploration-oriented platformers with tons of secrets everywhere, and the Japanese arcade platformers with linear but tightly designed stages, amongst other styles. However, the only style which has really been explored and executed well is the Western exploration-oriented style, so there's a lot of people out there who can't fathom a first-person shooter being linear as all hell and would give shit for it if it did, because in the minds of many it goes 'good level design -> Doom/Quake -> non-linear levels focused on exploration and lots of secrets'. So it's rather frustrating to me that the innovation for the FPS genre is right fucking there, in the arcades and the Japanese games of old, and that the genre wouldn't have been so fucking stagnant had the Japanese really cared about it as the only good first-person shooters are centered around exploration (or puzzle-solving) in some way because that's what most Western developers are more familiar with, while those which go for full-on action tend to be messy in one way or another. It's also why Vanquish, although a third-person shooter, is a breath of fresh air in a predominantly Western genre by its very Japanese tight-action nature, with there being a lot to learned from it (on top of featuring one of the best boss fights for both FPS/TPS, that one being the final double Bogey fight and actually challenging you on every skill).

Yet people would rather make retro throwbacks which miss the point entirely, roguelites which do a bang-up job of level design in general, walking simulators, and first-person movies. The Titanfall 2 singleplayer campaign was probably the most interesting example in a long while given how it executes first-person platforming via wallrunning and does away with the 'first-person platforming can never be done right' meme and level design reminiscent of classic Sonic levels in terms of pacing where you are constantly running through a gauntlet with many interweaving routes. Fuck exploration, just go fast. There's also something unexplored, the relation between action and platforming in a first-person shooter.

I wish people would break free of the mold Doom, Quake, and Half-Life. There's still way too many unexplored territory. It's also why I made this thread.

That was the only way you can make anything first person related because the majority of the population get motion sickness, idiot.

More likely it was a matter of technology being too primitive. There were some actual 3D first person games around that time, but look how simplistic they are.

just make it like those jungle arcade shooters they have at the movies

You've already failed. A joystick, possibly 2 of them, and 2-4 buttons per player.

And, as others have said, it's been done. Have another pic related.

OK, so make the tank actually a guy in a spacesuit, have the opponents be mostly infantry, with tanks as minibosses; drop in a few weapon/health power-ups, have a flying tank-battleship or some shit as the main boss. Ditch the wireframe and paint it over with a sci-fi, operator, or swords & sorcery texture set, and go.

FPS isn't that much of a stretch for arcade games, I'm not sure what you're on about?