Well folks, it's about time I did one of these. The voyage to early access continues, and I've been so busy with it that I've been neglecting devlogs here on Steam. But let's start fixing that with a quick look at where things are so far!
- Environments
Tilesets, tilesets, tilesets. I wanted Voidseekers to have its own unique look, which means no asset packs. That's a lot of work for a one-man dev team, so to help with efficiency everything is built into tilesets. These tilesets are broken down into ship "zones" which include hallways/utility areas (done), cargo (done), crew quarters (done), engineering (almost done), and the all-important helm/instrumentation areas (coming up).
Next up will be fleshing all these areas out with props and such, which should be a lot of fun. Post-launch I hope to add more areas to continue expanding the environmental variety. Eventually, I'd also love to make a procedural map generator, but those are later on the to-do list.
- Enemies
Next up, the all-important mooks; the void-corrupted remnants of lost crews. These are the generic enemies you'll see the most of while playing. If the ship is powered down, they'll begin the mission dormantly staring off into the stars. They aren't much of a threat individually, but the real problem comes if you start waking too many of them up with lights, activity, gunfire, movement, or basically anything else that disturbs the stillness of deep space.
Conveniently, player customization is something I already planned for, so armor pieces are modular. This means our not-so-friendly enemies here can spawn with an assortment of different armor pieces that can make for a more challenging target. Helmet? Going to have to break that before you can get that rewarding headshot. Chestpiece? Take a lesson from a certain other sci-fi horror game and aim for the limbs!
- The Spaceman
Last but not least, we can't forget our heroes themselves, the brave astronauts who will strip every copper wire, scrap every piece of titanium, and grab every last nuclear catalytic converter in the abandoned ships they find. These guys have gone through a bit of a rework since their iteration as my own 3d modeling skills have improved.
Customization is already in the works as well, and I'll talk about that in-depth more in a later devlog. Unlockable skins and visor colors are the first step, but options will eventually include some armor parts and helmets as well. I'm a sucker for sci-fi armor customization, so I hope you are too. Everyone needs to look their best when they're fighting for their lives in deep space.
In the meantime, if you'd like to follow along with more development posts you can find Voidseekers on Twitter at @VoidseekersDev and Tiktok at @VoidseekersGame. And of course, if you want to keep updated through steam give it a Wishlist!
- Captain, signing off
