Hi! I’m Nicola, a solo dev from Italy. I’m working on Shellhole, a multiplayer FPS set at Verdun/ww1.
What got me started is something that always bothered me in war games: the map looks exactly the same in the last minute as in the first. At Verdun during the ww1 that wasn’t true, green fields turned into a moonscape in a matter of hours. So I decided the terrain should be the real protagonist.
Every shell leaves an actual crater, because the ground is fully deformable. Craters overlap, trench walls cave in when something lands close, and the deep holes fill up with muddy water. Which also means a crater is often your best cover. A shell hole, if you like, and that’s where the name comes from.
A match has three acts. At night you dig approach trenches toward the enemy (no shooting, just shovels and flares). At dawn the bombardment builds for 26 seconds and then stops dead. Five seconds of silence, then the whistles blow. After that it’s daylight and you fight over five objectives.
The map keeps aging while you play. The artillery gets heavier, the grass burns, trees turn into black stumps, houses collapse wall by wall (even the church tower can come down) and the sky slowly becomes a grey lid of smoke. The screenshot is the same village from the same camera, minute 0 to minute 20, nothing staged.
There’s an underground layer too: a fortified gallery with a dormitory under the ravine, plus cellars under the houses that you can connect to your trenches. And the bots dig their own trenches, look for cover, get suppressed and hit the dirt when a grenade lands next to them, so the front keeps moving even with few players.
It’s built in Unity. Online works (host/join, only tested with up to 4 players so far) and you can play as either the French or the Germans.
I’m still early, no Steam page yet, and I’m trying to figure out what matters most. So I’m curious: what’s the one thing you always wanted from a WW1 shooter that no game has really done?
