Musketeers(working title)
Hey guys, we're finally ready to announce our current project with the working title Musketeers.
What is Musketeers?Musketeers is a roguelike platform game. Pardon, *yet another* roguelike platform game. Our goal is pretty much to create a game that plays like a blend of
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and
Rogue Legacy with coop for up to four players (both locally and online).
It actually started out as a cooperative stealth game about anti-terrorists but the concept didn't quite work out the way we wanted it to and ended up replacing the setting, the style and the majority of the gameplay, only keeping some of its tech. We thought that musketeers are cool and under-represented in games, as is steampunk, and came up with a setting where musketeers infilitrate a flying fotress. And no, we were not aware of the 2011 Three Musketeers film in a steampunk setting when we started.
So, there's going to be steampunk tech as well as some fantasy elements. Please don't expect it to be historically accurate. Heck, don't expect it to make any sense at all.
What's the current state and what's the plan?Well, so far we have a very nice and solid platform engine written in Game Maker Studio that also works very nicely online, basically all the technical groundwork is done at this point. The players have access to melee strikes and can fire their gun, there's traps and enemies as well as lootable chests that hold random perks. The fundementals for character progression are done, as is the map generator (by map I mean the system holding and connecting levels, not the levels themselves).
Just recently we did some huge changes, however, replacing our previous far too convoluted combat system (we've gone down from five to two attacks!) and taking a completely new approach to the gameplay in general. Basically the game's original concept was far too close to a brawler, it just occurred to us how much was wrong with that so we recently decided to take a big step back and focus on an interesting and challenging platforming experience for now (including prettier and more diverse environments and tons of traps) and design combat elements on top of that.
Most of the work ahead of us is going to be creating sprites. Tons of sprites. It's tough as we don't really have an artist. At this point we're considering to involve another person to help us out with that.
Our next big goal is to finish one whole stage, that's one full theme with a complete set of enemies, traps etc. and a boss (possibly also a sub-boss or two) with a randomly generated map that takes ~15 minutes to finish. That includes absolutely finished animation and character progression for the player character.
Anyway, we decided that this reset is the right occasion to announce our project here and from now on document our progress online and gather suggestions and other feedback.
VideoFor now there is only one video online showing some basic singleplayer gameplay. Watch it here:
ScreenshotsAnd here's some screens. All of them are screen caps from the video I linked to above. We will upload additional screenshots showing off more stuff soon, though. And yes, the guard sprites are just placeholders (like many other things), we DO have eyes.
We hope you enjoy what you've read and seen so far and that we will get input from you guys soon!
Stay tuned!
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