Welcome to the Yots Devlog!
We want to talk a bit more about the kind of game we’re making, where development currently stands, and briefly go over the progress we’ve made this year. Yes, we’re alive, and we’ve been hard at work on the game this whole time.
Yots - is a cooperative survival horror game. At some point we looked at modern quota based horror games, then at classic survival horror titles, and realized that their core gameplay elements fit together surprisingly well. To make that work, we had to move away from the crafting systems that are usually expected from the genre, at least for now, and instead focus on extremely limited resources and careful resource management.
Right now we’re finishing the core mechanics and filling the game with content for the demo planned for Steam Next Fest. We truly hope to show you the result of more than a year of work this June.
For the setting, we took inspiration from the eerie atmosphere of Hunt: Showdown and Silent Hill. The game takes place during the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s. Originally, we wanted every enemy to represent the fears and traumas of post war society, but we quickly ran into readability issues. The enemies looked too visually different from one another, almost as if they belonged to completely different worlds. Because of that, we recently started redesigning them with a more unified visual style.
“Momma” concept art.
This boss was originally meant to embody the fear of motherhood and the pressure surrounding it during the demographic crisis of the post war era. She will definitely appear in the future, most likely in a redesigned form. For now, she lives on in this concept art that we still absolutely love.
We’ve also been hard at work on the combat system.
In our case, combat turned out to be one of the most difficult parts of development. The idea of simply taking combat from a single player game and dropping it into multiplayer never really works. We had to redesign and rethink the system through multiple iterations before arriving at something close to the current version.
Fighting the Beast.
The combat ended up being fairly dynamic, with real dodging mechanics but without invulnerability frames. We also approached one of the genre’s classic problems in our own way. Backpedaling movement is slower, which means running away is still a viable option, but endlessly retreating while spamming attacks is no longer effective.
And yes, there’s no blocking mechanic. After all, this isn’t a fencing game about sword duels. Dodging, however, is absolutely essential. To prevent dodge spamming, we combined stamina with a resilience system. The more you exhaust yourself with constant actions, the less effective your dodges become, and even a simple hit from an enemy can stagger you.
That’s where things stand for now.
In future devlogs we’ll talk more about the demo, enemies, locations, and other systems we’re currently working on.
If you’re interested in following the development, be sure to follow us on social media below, keep up with our updates on Steam, and add Yots to your wishlist!
See you in the next devlogs!