Hello everybody! It's time for another seasonal Dreadshot Development Report <3
If you read the last report for the fall, then remember that a rather radical thing happened then: the development of the game actually had to start over. The old version of the project has been overgrown with a huge amount of technical stuff over the three years of development — old code, crooked file structure, temporary solutions and crutches. To develop the game further on such a foundation meant that it was almost guaranteed to be rewritten again in the future. Therefore, a difficult but necessary decision was made: restart the project and reassemble it, carefully transferring only the necessary assets and ideas.
This past winter has been dedicated to just that — building a new version of Dreadshot with a healthier foundation.
I'm not working on the game alone anymore.
The most important change this season is that one programmer has joined the development.
He is engaged in the creation of key game systems and the architecture of the project. This greatly changes the entire development process: if previously many decisions had to be made alone and often intuitively, now most of the technical things are discussed and designed in advance.
This is important for several reasons... First of all, key systems are now initially created with the expectation of scaling. Secondly, new ideas can be checked and adjusted faster. And, finally, the risk that the project will turn into one of unrelated solutions again is significantly reduced, as happened with the previous version of the game.
This is a huge step forward for an indie project. I'm focusing more and more on game design, game concepts, and gameplay experiences, and the programmer is making sure that there is a stable and understandable technical base for these ideas, while helping well in discussing game design and editing the design document. Sometimes it's useful to have a sensible person around who can clearly tell where I'm starting to inflate my ambitions, where the mechanics don't make sense, and where the gameplay could potentially break. A kind of fresh look. Meow.
The new foundation of the game
Most of the work this winter was not the most spectacular. We practically did not add content in the usual sense — instead, we built a foundation on which this content could appear later.
We have created a completely new project and started to transfer the basic game systems to it. One of the first things was the character's movement system, which we'll talk about later.
In parallel, a system was being built that manages the character's states and abilities. In the future, the player's movements and various game effects will work through it. This makes the game much more flexible: new mechanics can be added without having to rewrite half of the project.
The internal documentation of the project was also completely reassembled. Previously, it was more like a collection of scattered notes, but now it is a full-fledged working tool that helps you make decisions faster and maintain order in the project.
We also started to re-arrange old assets according to the new project structure and set up collaboration through the version control system. All this may sound quite technical, but in fact it's about one thing: the game finally has a neat and stable foundation.
And to be honest, in all the three years of development of the previous version of Dreadshot, the project has never had such a foundation.
Movement is one of the basics of the game
One of the central elements of Dreadshot has always been a fast and aggressive movement. Therefore, a significant part of this winter's work was devoted specifically to the transportation system. At the moment, a lot of movement mechanics have already been added to the game.:
Running
Crouching
Sliding
Dashes
Wallruning
Grappling hook
Climbing the ledges
Most importantly, all these movement mechanics are as flexible and customizable as possible. Conditionally, all mechanics can be performed in the oath mode, which means that the player can, for example, be attracted by a hook into narrow spaces while in the oath.
The mechanics that were in the previous version of the game are gradually returning to the new architecture.: running on walls, a cat hook, the ability to climb on surfaces and other elements of vertical movement. But this time, everything is being implemented not as a set of separate experiments, but as a single system.
Now all the basic elements of movement have already been implemented and work within the overall architecture of the game. This means that they are no longer temporary prototypes. They are already part of the overall system and can be flexibly configured and expanded.
At the current stage, the work is mainly focused on polishing sensations. It is necessary to ensure that the mechanics do not just work, but feel natural and comfortable in battle. This will make the game much faster, more fun and more stylish.
The weapons is gradually returning
In parallel with the movement, we began to bring the weapon system back into the game.
So far, we are talking about fundamental things: shooting, changing weapons and reloading. Visually, it doesn't look like anything right now, but the main thing now is not the appearance, but the architecture of the system itself, and it is designed in such a way that in the future it will be possible to quickly add new types of weapons and experiment with mechanics without breaking the rest of the game. This was one of the problems with the old version of the project: any addition of weapons often required adapting too many related systems. Now we are trying to avoid this problem at an early stage.
Rethinking game design: style is now at the forefront
In addition to the technical work, this winter has been a period of quite a serious revision of the Dreadshot game design itself. We discussed fundamental issues a lot.: what exactly should move the player forward, what actions the game should encourage, what decisions the player should make during the battle.
Disclaimer: everything described below in this chapter is not the final version of the game's game design. Everything can still change 10 times, although, for the sake of truth, I am 90% sure of most of the following.
The main idea that we gradually came to is that the game itself should push the player to play actively and aggressively. We don't want the optimal strategy to be to slowly shoot enemies from a safe corner. Dreadshot must constantly push the player forward - towards risk, speed, and combinations of mechanics.
One of the key systems around which this approach is currently being built is the style system. In the new version of the game, style is not just beautiful points for spectacular kills - it is directly related to the survival and progress of the player. The recovery of health will depend on how actively and beautifully the player is playing: if the player has a low style rank, then absolutely no treatment will fall from enemies, and the higher the style rank, the more it will fall. In addition, a high level of style can open up additional opportunities — both in the current battle (so far the idea is that the functioning of weapons differs depending on the style), and in the overall progression of the game (potentially, completing levels to the highest ranks of style will give access to new content: levels, weapons, and others). Passive play will not be encouraged in any way.
We also started experimenting with ideas where different types of weapons interact with each other. Instead of making ordinary pistols and submachine guns, we want to create weapons that are atypical in appearance, which also combine with each other and form interesting game situations.
In order not to turn the game back into a chaotic set of mechanics, we have created a special set of quality criteria for game systems. Any new system is now evaluated based on a number of questions: how understandable it is to the player, whether it creates interesting solutions, whether it supports the pace of the game and whether it fits into the overall gameplay cycle.
This helps you make decisions more meaningfully and reduces the risk that the game will feature mechanics that look interesting on paper but don't work in real gameplay.
An invisible but important job
In parallel with the gameplay systems, work is underway on the infrastructure of the game. In particular, we started implementing a new user interface architecture and developing a save system. These are the things that the player almost never notices directly, but they ensure the stability of the game and allow the project to develop normally further. If such systems are poorly made, problems begin to appear in the most unexpected places, so we try to pay attention to them in advance.
Plans for the next months
Now we are gradually moving from the foundation construction stage to the stage of forming a full-fledged game cycle.
Our immediate goal is to build the minimum viable version of the game (MVP). This is the version in which the main gameplay will already work and which can be shown to the players. We expect to complete this stage by the end of spring. After that, the first playtests are scheduled to begin in the summer to get feedback and understand how the game feels from the outside. If everything goes according to plan, we will try to prepare a playable demo of Dreadshot by the fall.
Wishlists
As usual in the season-by-season reports, I'm telling you how things are with the game's visellists. The game is on the wish list of 7,083 (-149) people. The decline is quite severe, but it is understandable, since I completely stopped marketing the game on social networks, and devoted myself entirely to development.
Thanks
Thanks to everyone who follows the development, shares news about the game and just stays close. For an indie project without a publisher and marketing budget, this really means a lot.
This winter was the period when the game was actually reborn on a new foundation. Now the next phase begins — the transformation of this foundation into a full-fledged game.