Introduction
Hey there!
This is our first devlog – a type of post focused on updates specifically relating to the games we make. If you don’t know what our first game, T1, is about, you can check it out here.
This first devlog will serve as an introduction to the current status of T1, what we’ve gotten done so far, and where we plan on going.
The Plan
The main gameplay loop will go like this:
The player will enter a portal, taking them to “The Collide”. The Collide is a randomly-generated series of levels. Each level in The Collide will be randomly generated, filled with random objects and enemies. Players will use telekinesis to kill enemies in each level.
Players will also get the opportunity to take on optional bosses, rewarding them with powerful items. As players progress, difficulty will increase, introducing new enemies, bosses, and more.
As players kill enemies and defeat bosses, they’ll get money. This money can be used to buy new items to assist their current run into The Collide. Money and items are lost upon death, so they must be used wisely.
Based on their performance in the last run into The Collide, players will acquire Cabin Tokens. Cabin Tokens can be used to upgrade and customize the player’s Cabin, a home base.
Players will also be able to unlock other playable characters, each with their own unique abilities.
The goal of the game is to upgrade and customize the Cabin, and discover what caused The Collide.
The Collide
There are quite a few components that go into making The Collide and the majority of the gameplay for T1.
Firstly, and most importantly is the telekinesis ability. This is one of the very first things we got done and is for the most part, done. There’s likely going to be a few small tweaks here and there, but the majority of the work is done.
Next, movement is completely done. Like telekinesis, there will probably be a bit of fine-tuning, but nothing that will take a whole bunch of development time.
Another really important aspect of The Collide is its random level generation. The framework behind the randomness is complete. We have a couple room environments done, and all that remains is to make some more art for additional environments.
Enemies and objects are in a similar state to the level generation. The framework is there, and all that’s left is to make more of it. Objects are really simple, we just make the art, click a couple buttons and it’s done! Enemies are a bit tougher. The framework that every enemy will be using is there, but since we don’t want every enemy to feel the same, we will have to do more work for each enemy we add. As of writing this, we only have two enemies finished. We don’t want the game to feel repetitive, so we want to make that number much higher before release so expect this to take a bit of time.
For the shop and objects, we have a lot of the fundamentals done. The shop is almost done, we just need to replace the placeholder art and we’re done. We have the system that manages items done, we just need more items. Right now, we only have two items finished. We want to have a lot of items before release, so this will probably take quite a bit of time. It’s tough to say how long each item will take, as some are much easier to implement than others.
We haven’t started work on the bosses yet. We want each fight to feel unique and epic, so these will take a bit of time.
We have everything set up for adding new playable characters. Adding them is easy, but time-consuming.
I think that’s about it for The Collide!
The Cabin
We don’t have much for the Cabin done quite yet. Right now, we’re still in the early planning stages for it. In fact, here’s our current plan for the layout:
This is clearly a very early version, there’s definitely going to be a bit of change here and there, but the basic layout shouldn’t change too much.
In the future, we want a whole bunch of rooms, decorations, trophies, characters, and much more. None of this will be too difficult to add, but considering how much we want to add, it will take a bit of time.
Menus
We want to finish the most important aspects of the game before focusing on the menus, so we don’t have much set up here.
We have a placeholder main menu and a few settings you can tweak, but not much else.
We’ve been toying around with the idea of making The Cabin essentially function as a main menu, but we’ll see how that goes.
Our Plan For The Next Month
Our biggest priority right now is working on the Cabin and getting all the code that will go into it written. Hopefully next month we’ll have something to show off!
We’re also going to be trying to work on some PR stuff to get the word out about 8 Ball Studios! We don’t really have a plan for this quite yet, but we’ll figure something out!
The Future
We want to make sure T1 is super cool when it does eventually come out, so the list of what we’re doing will probably grow. Because of this, we can’t really give a good estimate of when it will come out.
We also don’t want to release the game before it’s ready, so we’ll be sure to take our time to sure make everything works, and is fun to play before it comes out.
Conclusion
A lot of the fundamentals for the game are done, and all that’s left is to simply add more. We want to make sure there’s a lot to do when it comes out, so it may take us some time.
If you want to follow our progress, make sure to follow our Instagram and Twitter to keep up to date!