Hey everyone.
We'd like to first start by wishing everyone a Happy Thanksgiving, and hope your holidays are off to great start.
Over the last 3 months, Zane and I have started development on a roguelike that is meant to encapsulate our love for games like Risk of Rain, Enter the Gungeon and Hades. There will be a lot to cover for this week's devlog but I'll do my best to keep it brief. Please note the game doesn't have a name yet, but we're circulating ideas.
Before I begin, I'd like to introduce our first playable character, Soren
The game's core loop is a co-op survivor, where you can play with friends and travel through realms, survive waves of monsters, and gain power through items from chests.
In order to capture our love (and hopefully yours too) for bullet hell games, we optimize regularly to ensure the game can handle a large amount of enemies and projectiles on screen.
Throughout your journey, you will find chests scattered throughout the map which contain items that make you stronger.
It's important to us that the player is able to feel a prominent power gain while playing, and the current build contains over 30 completed items (with many more to come). The items are currently split into 3 rarities, Common, Uncommon and Legendary.
Items are stackable and each stack adds further stat gain or increases effects gained by the item.
Here's some examples of items and their power gain:
Performance Enhancer - Increase movement speed
Spellcaster Bracer - Increases knockbacks
We also have items with fun little chain effects such as this one:
Cherry Bomb - Chance to explode confetti on kills
We started this project in August 2022 after we joined two game jams, Vylocity Game Jam and GMTK 2022 and made survivors for both, Eldritch Ocean and Chance to Die. It was then we realized how much we loved playing and creating survivor roguelikes, and then we began work on a full scale survivor roguelike.
A lot of the early leg work was put into setting the core engine, testing and stabilizing multiplayer, and planning out our road map, which we would like to make public soon.
Once November hit, we started going over how we want the stages to feel. Some of the gifs and videos are earlier renditions of a stage we were playing around with, but here's how the first stage will look:
It's important to note that while the rooms are pre-designed, the layout of every stage is randomly generated.
Once we started development on the new stage, we decided it'd be fun if we could incorporate puzzles, traps and other features into our maps.
We started off with spike traps:
After talks about making destructible and pushable objects, along with pressure plates, this started to happen:
We also added some nifty gates:
While that may not look like much, it was a moment where we realized, we had a gateway into a series of systems that can work together to create interesting effects. Without boring you with the details, here's what ended up landing on:
We've already started incorporating some of these mechanics in our new stage, and there's certainly a lot more to play with here. The important thing we'll be keeping in mind is how all these puzzles and mechanics will work in the ebb and flow of the core survival gameplay, but that'll be a post for another day.
In October I went down to SJ Geekfest to showcase our prototype
It was a lot of fun getting to see people try out the game, and we collected some amazing feedback from everyone.
If you made it this far into the post, thank you. This past 3 months has been a freight train of progress on this this project.
We post regularly on our socials, so please follow us there if you're looking to get updates on this more frequently.
Mastodon: Mastodon.gamedev.place
We've also started an official discord for this project, where you can feel free to ask us any questions about the game and we will swiftly answer them : discord.gg/SunPZK2VtM
We look forward to sharing more with you next week!
Your game looks great, very good graphics, I would like to participate in the creation of the soundtrack or sound design if you do not already have, greetings.