Today, I wanted to give everyone a preview of the game we are currently working on, Skurvy. As with any of our games, Skurvy started out as a simple idea. The biggest challenge we've faced as an indie developer is resources. We have a lot of ideas for games but being just three people, there are many concepts we don’t have the manpower to realize. We noticed this trend in our jam entry games. We always ran out of time to implement the idea we came up for the jam fully. Minimalist Horror Story, Ten Seconds of Night and particularly Brass Bastards were not finished to our satisfaction. We had great ideas for them but didn't have the time to implement them completely. We will talk more about that in a future post. At best I’d say each of those games is half finished. So, a few months ago Eric came to us with an idea for an interesting and straightforward game, a pirate themed rogue-like FPS. He wanted to do it with a simple graphical style and did a few mock ups.
Initial work on Skurvy
Once Eric showed us his initial work, we whipped up a design document and all got to work. We got the game to a playable point but had a problem. The game had veered away from our initial goal of a rogue-like FPS and more into the territory of a typical action adventure game. The levels were open world and we'd wasted a lot of time solving some of the problems with open world games in Unity, when our focus should have been narrowed in on really getting the core gameplay to a solid state.
Earliest Skurvy Build
We had a lot of grand ideas for Skurvy at this point and we could have easily let the project get too ambitious. As you can see from the image above, it was a large open world, and we were toying with the idea of ship combat, sprawling levels and even some RPG elements. We realized that we were straying and refocused our efforts to get Skurvy back to our initial concept.
Current Skurvy Build
We are going for a toon style similar to Team Fortress 2. The screenshots don’t do Eric’s amazing art and animation justice. I am running around a test dungeon with a Mayan theme. You may have noticed I have only one heart in the images of the current build. That’s because I am getting owned by the mobs. Skurvy is coming along well. There is some challenge in the combat, death is permanent, game play is focused in the dungeons and there will be power ups and weapons to help you along your way. I hope you liked the peek at Skurvy and there will be more to come. Check back later for more updates on this and other Minion Studios projects.
