Welcome to the neighborhood! My name is Herb, I’m the primary developer on The Zappening! and I’m excited to give you a brief introduction and share some insight for our gameplay goals as we make our way towards a public demo.
In essence, The Zappening! is a game that is all about exploring the design space of first-person combat. It borrows the best parts of old-school beat'em ups and drops them into a classic FPS sandbox, where combos, juggling, and mix-ups are as integral as headshots and explosions.
When first designing the combat we knew there were a handful of items we really wanted to focus on:
The application of core Beat’em up design in a First-Person 3D environment
Evolving enemy execution
Achieving gameplay parity between melee and ranged
Steering clear of input complexity
Much of our above goals were achieved by moving away from low Time-To-Kills and really giving each player action, simply some time to breathe; allowing the player to analyze the change in combat state as one action builds into another. Plus it's just fun to beat monsters up!
When player actions are layered inside an FPS sandbox it results in what I like to call Cascading Chaos, where simple actions can combine into something more than the sum of their parts. Launching enemies into others, using them as a jump pad, chaining together attack strings, the options are near limitless and it’s a blast exploring them.
We are currently heads down making sure this combat is the best it can be. I’ll be writing a monthly devlog to keep all of you up to date so keep an eye out for that. We will be holding off on a discord until we have a demo ready. I’ll be able to share a more definitive date for both of those later this year.
TL;DR:
FPS x Beat-’em-up
Cascading Chaos: longer action states create emergent chain reactions.
Monthly devlogs + smaller updates between.
If this sounds fun, please wishlist The Zappening! and follow along!