Hi Friends,
It’s been a while since the last development post (3 months!), so let's see what we've been up to
We’ve been busy attending games-industry events for the first time this year. It takes a lot of time, energy and resources to attend these events, but somehow makes what we're doing seem more real, and seeing people pick up the game and enjoy it is a great feeling.
Most of what we've been doing however, is developing the meta-game aspect of Breachway.
Digging into the non-combat meta-game opened a lot of cool possibilities for gameplay and interesting wats for the player to interact with and discover the universe we’ve been creating
The game has always had a mind of it’s own, guiding us in the direction it wanted to develop in. This can result in a game that is more experimental and that doesn’t aim to replicate any specific formula, and it’s fun to discover the game bit by bit as you’re working on it. The big downside of this approach however is uncertainty and scope creep.
This process of discovery (and the resulting scope creep) has also led us delay the release of our game, so we don’t compromise our vision, and so that we can spend more time on polish, bug-fixing, and improving the player experience.
Here is a quick breakdown of what we did since July:
- Attended Gamescom, saw a lot of people play and enjoy the game, we even met one of the people in our Discord server, he beat the demo twice on two separate days :D We actually have a few stories of people beating the demo on their first run, including a dad and his ~12 year old son. Gamescom was a blast!
- We have Qualified for the Indie 80 Selection, and received a booth in the Indie space at the Tokyo Game Show, so we took that as the perfect excuse to go and visit Japan before the event started
- We implemented the first iteration of the meta map, and started testing the game loop , including the faction relation system and non-combat events.
- We created 20+ events, both generic and narrative events that are specific to the situation in our first solar system map
- We further defined the factions, and fleshed out crew characters and the crew abilities
- We are testing a fuel system to go with the more free-roam approach, similar to FTL. You will have a limited amount of fuel every time you enter a solar system, and while you can get more fuel from space stations and some events, the quantity will be very limited.
- We added a new ship explosion system
- Added targeting reticles and improved the general UX
- Added more enemy animations, making them more reactive to player actions
- Lastly, we’ve added a lot more characters to our world, here are a few of them:
The next 3 months are going to be very important for Breachway's development, we're almost done with the features we set out to create, we only have a couple more unique features we need to playtest and validate.
From here on out we'll mainly be focusing on adding more ships, enemies, cards and equipment, as well as tightening up the game experience as much as we can.
This is it for now, see you next time, Space Cowboy.
Victor