From the very beginning of development, Demons with Shotguns was purely designed to be a local multiplayer only game. However, as development progressed, I started to understand that a lot of times players would simply not have anyone around to play with. Thus, I began to conjure up ideas of how to incorporate some form of singleplayer into the game.
My initial thoughts were to add bot support. From a technical stand point, this is pretty challenging, to create sophisticated enough AI that seems like you're playing against another player, but I'm up to the challenge and recently I've started toying around with how this would work. I actually came up with a system that's seemingly extremely hacky, but should work very well; basically instead of the game getting input values from an actual external input device, it'll receive input values from a AI system.
I am not promising bots will be apart of the game right now. I am saying that I'm looking into it and until it's an actual bullet point in the game's description, you shouldn't expect it to be apart of the game :)
The other idea of including singleplayer/co-op play was to include an enemy wave game mode, called End of Times, which I'm actually starting to favor more over including bots. This would essentially be players fighting against wave after wave of increasingly difficult enemies. This idea is still very new and needs to be designed much further, but I have started prototyping some basic, rudementery enemies in the game to get an idea of what needs to be added and changed to support this type of game mode. Thankfully the way I've developed the game, it's very easy to adapt to changes.
Here's a gif of some prototype skulls roaming about, charging after the player once they get within distance.
So again, I am not promising that End of Times will be apart of the game right now. I am saying that I'm looking into it, but it's looking very positive right now. I really need to stick to my October release period, so if it's determined that implementing End of Times would put that release period at risk, then I'll most likely exclude it from the initial release and include the game mode as a free DLC some time post-release.
