Hey whoah, it's me luke! This is my first post here in the big scary Steam announcements; perhaps I'll get to it more often as we go along.
So... the game's been in development for like... what? Three years now? Loads of rewrites, development cycles, artwork redoes, roster changes, etc. but I think we're finally at a point where that's done. The game's always been a deathmatch shooter with wacky abilities, but all the OTHER stuff seems to be locked in now. There's a todo-list somewhere with everything the game needs to be completed, and it's not changing any more.
Progress
In the name of "transparency," or something, allow me to serenade you with everything I've been working on over the past few months.
Character Models
Our old models looked horrible. I threw them together using some front/back A-pose images and PIFuHD which just didn't work very well. I've been debating with myself for a long time because of how much work it would take to back up and redo it all over again the proper way. I finally pulled the trigger and hired a 3D artist to do all eight of our characters from scratch. He did a good job, especially for the relatively low amount of money I was able to cough up.
before
after
I feel like there's less personality in there as a result, but they've got proper topology, are rigged properly, and even have modeled peripherals like glasses, shoes, CLOTHING!! etc...
As a result...
New models, new rigs, great. The only problem with that is that now all the animations I painstakingly did in Unity's crap animation system are gone. So this means I need to redo all of them again from scratch.
The real issue is that I can't animate. I suck at it, no ifs or buts. I'm planning on adding IK to all the models in Blender and doing the animation there, but that's a big undertaking regardless. So that's what I'm going to be working on for the next couple months likely. It's a big wall, but I will eventually get over it. Welcome to solo dev.
Map Editor
Progress has been good with the map editor. I consider it essential to get up and running so that other members of our group can work on maps in the meantime while I work on the gameplay. And because all of us are basically nematodes (our brains could be simulated with JavaScript and nobody would know), the map editor needs to be straightforward to use, idiot-proof, and otherwise user-friendly. Turns out, this also aligns perfectly with the goal of basically any user-facing app, so it means finishing the map editor is FINISHING the map editor.
I've got map saving/loading, the out-of-game asset editor works (and it works REALLY well), and you can load props, create blocks, move them around, scale them, rotate them, undo/redo, delete, the whole shebang. I still need to:
- Make it so you can edit blocks' actions, like if they damage you, or bounce you, or teleport you, etc..
- Add the paint tool for painting blocks in the map.
- Make it so you can create/edit text in the map.
- Add support for quickly dropping into the map with the in-game character controller for testing.
- MAYBE multiplayer support for collaborative editing. The infrastructure is there, but it might be overkill.
basically, work work work.
Now what?
Making an indie game, especially as one LITTLE GUY in an ocean of stuff, is pretty hard. In 2024, two games were released on Steam every hour (that's insane). How does Prego Wars stand out? I have no idea yet. Mutators are cool, Steam workshop is cool, but really, Wishlists are the number one way to make an impact at launch.
There are 109 awesome people who've decided to put Prego Wars on their wishlist, which is super encouraging. One hundred is a big milestone alone, and I'm grateful that that many people took time out of their day to log in and add the game to their wishlist. That said, we need lots more, so maybe tip a friend off to the game or spread the word some other way if you dig what me and my friends are doing here.
I've got way more to share with the game, so maybe I'll make posting here a monthly/bi-monthly thing. (we'll see, I said the game would be out 2 years ago so making schedules clearly doesn't work for me.)
interested?
I post most granular progress updates in the Discord server, so join up if you like these kind of posts or want to see how the game's doing!
OK BYE -LUKE ːsteamhappyː