Wake up Mr Freeman, wake up and smell the ashes.
It feels a little bit like that. Honestly, I’m hoping its anywhere in the vicinity of that.
I mentioned in the last post that I’d like to get something small out the door, to work on a project roughly the size of Hoplite. Well, its been a good eight months since then and I’ve not got a lot to show for it. We’re going through the first six months of daycareitis (that actually lasts 18-360 months) again and my ability to stay conscious is absolutely thrashed. On a good day I might get four to five hours work time, but more often than not I’m daycare-away-from-daycare.
Good times.
Over the past year and a bit since Exoloper’s launch I’ve worked mostly on contract jobs to pay the bills. But sprinkled in between I’ve spent a little bit of time working on a couple concepts. The major one to talk about was a revivification of the Charge project, this time as a rougelite singleplayer strategy game. It was looking pretty fun, but ultimately didn’t pan out, and I stopped work on it after breaking my right pinky in September of last year. The upside though is I managed to get some really good foundational work done on Godot system stuff.
More recently, I’ve had a few days over the course of the past few months to work though, and I’ve spent that time working on what I’d like to call [WORKING TITLE] Behemoth. For a decade now I’ve been wanting to go back to the Unstoppable IP and do something with it. The original game was a ton of fun to make, and to this day continues to sell copies every now and then. Everyone who did play it (and talked to me about it) universally loved it. So thats what I’m doing, going back to that frozen wasteland to go and scrap some stuff.
The elevator pitch this time is that you’ve somehow managed to revive a monstrous pre-catastrophe mega vehicle: Impervious to damage, taking up the full span of a highway in width, and an insatiable need for fuel. You begin a run with a pittance of fuel and scrap, and armed with a grappling hook and scrap foundry, you consume smaller vehicles along the roadway, harvesting them for resources to keep you going.Those resources can then be used to upgrade the vehicle, which in turn allows you to scrap more vehicles, and keeps your ever dwindling fuel reserves from finally snuffing out. Expect mayhem, explosions, twisted metal and carnage.
At this point I’ve more or less got the core gameplay loop up and running in a vertical demo and its already fun. The moment to moment gameplay is tense, requires simple inputs but has complex outputs and I think is generally pretty solid and doable.
I’m not exactly sure how long this will take to make, or when I’ll be putting up the first betas (or for that matter, screenshots) but its already leagues smaller than Exoloper and Interloper, so thats a win. Maybe.. maybe if I get enough time I might be able to release it this year? Probably not.
#dev/blog