-Matthijs Kramer, Creative Director, Alterego Games.
Its 2021… our second adventure game was being prepared for launch, and we had to start thinking about a new project. We knew we wanted to do something in the Adventure Genre, but there’s a million directions to go from there.
Do you go with an idea you know will sell well? Do you continue working on a previous project in the form of a sequel? (and there’s been more than one person asking us to make Woven 2)
Somehow we ended up developing a gearpunk adventure game where you build a drone army to battle against injustice.
What happened?
Theme - Gearpunk
We usually start with a theme to get us concepting in the right direction. All of us have this shared love for steampunk. Even though some team members, whom I won’t name (dominic), wanted to make a sci-fi space opera, the steampunk love won in the end and we managed to settle on a theme.
There’s this sort of scale within the steampunk genre.
There’s the most well-known version, the full Victorian Steampunk, in the middle.
To the right you’ll find the dark and gritty ‘dieselpunk’ where technology has advanced some more.
To its left it has ‘gearpunk’, which is more lighter and usually has less technological advancement.
Not a whole lot of people use Gearpunk, and we liked that little thing the subgenre does where you don’t get depressed when looking at concept art.
The first concept art sat really well with the team and got everyone excited, we found ourselves in a great place to start concepting some story elements.
Story – A Rebel’s Quest
There are many stories to tell in a Gearpunk setting, but we wanted something with a cheeky rebellious spirit to it.
Some creatives on the team wanted the narrative to touch on the importance of freedom, whilst others wanted the game in some way to reflect on the climate change mankind is facing.
Our main writer really wanted to write a female character lead, and the start of City of Springs was born.
You play Val, a rebel at heart, who lives a hard life in the last city on earth, surrounded by wastelands. She’s a mechanic, brilliant at fixing things, and when confronted with the cruelty of the regime that governs the city, she takes it upon herself to do something about the situation. She wants the people of Riveton to be free, and if it takes a revolution to do so, she’ll start one.
Gameplay – Tactical Combat
Content-wise, our previous titles had more focus on the narrative than on the gameplay. We had some cool obstacle courses in Woven, and some scary stealthy action in Sanity of Morris, but for City of Springs we wanted gameplay to be central in the games design.
We knew we were itching to create combat game mechanics for our next title. Something fun to do, easy to learn, but complex to master, that players could really spend time with.
The idea of a tinkerer making her own makeshift drones from the scrap she finds of the street stuck with us. The concept of drone-based combat was born from that idea. In city of Springs you’ll fight guards armed with tons of drones with a small army of your own makeshift drones. You’ll have to observe the types of robots your opponents are using to attack you, and act accordingly if you want to strike them where they’re weakest.
There are a few more core concepts of this game such as stealth and questing.
But this post is already waaaaay longer than what I was supposed to write. Stay tuned for more City of Springs logs in the coming months where we’ll tell you all about those features!
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