To New Horizons
Hey folks!
Time seems to be flying lately! Against the background of a tumultuous year in the games industry and our autumn event-a-thon, we’re still diligently working on CACTUS. As a matter of fact, the game has recently entered the production phase, meaning we’re finally building the actual story levels you’ll get to play once the full thing releases to the public.
Time to clarify some things and update you on our progress.
Let’s go!
Fresh Story Levels
Our designer Jeremy stepped his foot on the gas regarding story levels. After all, the goal is clear: Design and create the complete story campaign as completable greybox levels. This ensures that each of them can be playtested and iterated on as fast as possible, enabling Pierre to apply his artist magic to them.
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The first level, called “Oasis” just reached this state, delivering a rudimentary proof of fun already.
For this, Jeremy had to solve three major issues:
- The level serves as the story introduction, so he had to clearly envision and leave space for narrative sequences, such as cutscenes.
- Besides that, it’s also the tutorial of the game, teaching essential mechanics to players.
- Lastly, the level is our first outdoor-first area, meaning Jeremy had to freshen up his terrain building skills.
It goes without saying that there is still a lot of work to do here. Nonetheless, sticking to simplicity is key when designing early versions of levels, so expect further updates in the near future.
Time For Heroes
Talking about our event-a-thon: Earlier this month, we had the opportunity to exhibit CACTUS at HeroFest in Berne and made some astonishing discoveries.
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First of all, the reception was exceptionally good and the booth was occupied at all times. Secondly, the game seemed to attract people of all ages, both from the Fortnite generation, as well as veteran players that grew up with Wolf 3D and Doom. And lastly, particularly with regards to kids, the cactus appealed to both boys and girls equally, which led to the fun sight of families clustered around an FPS booth.
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And of course, we won’t stop there. The next chance to meet us and play the game will be at Berlin Games Ground, starting on November 9th.
🥳 Feel like participating?
United (Again?)
It goes without saying that Unity caused quite a ruckus over the past weeks. Just like any indie developer, we’ve pondered the question of switching our engine and ran tests with competitive products.
Ultimately, we’ve decided against a switch. Mainly because the cost of doing so mid-project would be higher than sticking to Unity. However, we have gotten involved in some open source projects and will evaluate creating our own engine fork, once we start planning out the successor.
So for now, we’ll bite the bullet and stay focused on delivering the game to you.
What's Next?
Besides preparing for Berlin Games Ground, our main focus will be creating more story levels as fast as possible. Meanwhile, Pierre is crafting fresh new enemies which you’ll soon get to see and our coder Nils is ramping up our custom A.I. systems to make said enemies more interesting and smart.
So I think it’s fair to say, that you should expect exciting new things in the near future.
Happy weekend!
Oliver
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