We are absolutely passionate about making games. That’s why, even after completing 9 games without a major hit, we’re still at it! If we were in this just for the sake of it, we would have given up long ago. But our love for game development keeps us going strong.
In this article, I’ll give you a brief yet thrilling glimpse into our creative process during art crafting and highlight the most notable inspirations behind various aspects of this project. Get ready for an exciting journey into the heart of our game development!
Inspirations behind the artstyle:
Our graphic style is a nostalgic trip back to the golden age of gaming, when engines couldn’t yet render the gloss of surfaces. Inspired by iconic titles like Quake 1 and other 90’s classics, we completely strip away the gloss and metallic effects in Unity for this project. To achieve that gritty, rusted, and dusty look, we add color indexing during texture creation, intentionally degrading the textures. This crucial step is what gives our game its authentic retro vibe!
During this process, I meticulously adjust gamma, brightness, and saturation sliders to perfect the effect for our project. Every single texture in the game, and there are dozens, undergoes this labor-intensive procedure. It’s a painstaking process, but it results in a truly unique visual experience!
I absolutely love fine-tuning textures, colors, and other artistic elements in our games. It’s my passion and obsession!
Below, you can see the texture for the Behemoth before and after the indexing procedure. Besides indexing (done in Photoshop or Gimp), each monster texture is finished with hand-painting in Blender, adding blood, details, and shadows. Left - image taken in Substance Painter after a quick applying of overall color and basic shapes to the texture. Right - ready texture in Blender.
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Inspirations behind the gameplay:
Our current version of the build is mainly inspired by roguelite gameplay. There is something magical in constant trying, dying and upgrading. Because of that currently the gameplay takes place on small arenas and basically looks like that:
- You enter first random arena
- Waves of monsters attack you
- You kill them all or die trying
- Hearts pop up from monsters
- You collect them
- If you are alive you go through a short tunnel to next arena
- In tunnel you can buy upgrades
- You play enough and Boss appears in one of arenas
- If you succeed in killing boss next enviro + new monsters and weapons are unlocked
After going from TPP to FPS we noticed that arenas are too small now. That’s why we will remake them in the coming months. Final ones will be more vertical and about 50% larger than current ones.
One of our core principles is to always keep an open mind to new ideas and paths. This mindset is what will ultimately allow us to create the masterpiece that every indie game creator dreams of. THAT’S WHY we don’t rule out the possibility that our current gameplay model might evolve into something entirely different in the future.
There have been countless instances of this in the world of game development. Take Half-Life 1, for example, which was completely redesigned shortly before its release. We believe that what we have now is fantastic, but we always remain hopeful that an extraordinary piece of the puzzle will suddenly appear, completing the whole picture!
Quake, Doom, classic cinema and more:
I absolutely love Quake! It’s one of my favorite memories from my teenage years. Even after all these years, it’s still an incredible game. Some of our monsters are heavily inspired by the iconic baddies from Quake 1. The nostalgia and thrill of those classic encounters continue to fuel our creativity and passion for game development!
Shambler:
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I think our version is more athletic so more dangerous - just look at this chest… how wide and muscular it is 🙂
Spider inspired by Voore from Quake1:
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Vomitor - gently inspired by Cacodemon form Doom:
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Nosferatu:
Nosferatu from the classic 1922 film is extraordinary, iconic and still terrifying after over 100 years. He is a hero of memes and will remain with us forever. That's why he had to appear in SPORTAL:
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What is coming in the future:
We always keep our minds wide open. Why? Because you never know when something wild will come your way! Just a few days ago, I stumbled upon this insanely crazy meme. Check it out! My first thought was to use it as inspiration for our next monster. I’ll rework the head and add some massive, terrifying teeth. It’s so outlandish that I couldn’t have dreamed it up myself.
The meme is already super creepy, and with these additions, it might just become the scariest monster in our game! This kind of spontaneous creativity is what makes game development so thrilling. You never know where the next great idea will come from, and sometimes, it’s from the most unexpected places.
Can’t wait to see how terrifying this new monster turns out!
Thanks!
Ok guys. That's all for today's devlog. I hope you enjoyed it, so please leave a like and give us a comment, maybe about what you would like to know about Sportal in upcoming devlogs! See you soon! Stay tuned!