Devlog #1 (you can find it on our blog here)For this first devlog I’ll try to summarize what have been done on the project so far and what are the plans for the near future. But first let’s start with some background.
BackgroundI started to work on the game almost one year ago (November 2013 to be precise), soon after playing Mark of the Ninja and Monaco. I’m a huge fan of stealth game, and in each of them I always try to take the silent and non-lethal route. I really loved Mark of the Ninja, but I’ve been a bit disapointed by Monaco, actually it’s a great arcade and co-op game, but the stealth part is not what I’ve been expecting, I found it really hard in solo to play as a “shadow”, and most of the time the only solution you have is to run as fast as possible with multiple opponents behind you to reach the exit. But I was really impressed by the line of sight system, and as a developer, I was curious to see how it worked, and as a player I saw lot of potential left in it for top down stealth games. And that’s how the project started, the idea was to try to mix the great stealth mechanisms and high mobility of Mark of the Ninja with a top down view and a realistic line of sight system.
Another important feature (or non-feature actually) of the game is that you can’t kill your opponents (guards or other players in multiplayer), we know that most of the people enjoy the action side of a stealth game and I even enjoyed it myself a lot in Mark of the Ninja. But we have several reasons for it:
- The prime idea behind the project is to provide a “pure” stealth experience, we want to concentrate all our efforts on this aspect of the game, we’re a small team (2 developers currently), and we prefer working on new ways to escape after behing detected than adding weapons to the game.
- One of my references when starting the project was immediately Cat’s Eye, it came far from my childhood and I can’t let it go, I want to play a thief and not a killer stealing art pieces from museums or from bad guys collections.
- Another aspect we want to explore with this project is mixing stealth and multiplayer, Monaco is doing it very well for co-op, but we also want to try competitive modes. And when you have 2 thiefs (or 2 teams) trying to be the first to steal the objective, we think it will be a lot more fun to try to lure the guards making them catch the other player than just killing them and soon being in an empty level without anymore challenge.
StatusSo let’s come back to the current state of the game. As I said, there’s almost one year of work done on the project, but unfortunately we can only work on it in our spare time, we still need another job to be able to feed our families (or pets), and I’ve been alone on the project for some time, the second developer started around April 2014. So what have been done so far?
First of all, we’re using an existing engine for the game, LOVE, it’s really great and I’ll probably make a whole devlog about it and why I picked it, but it can’t be compared to something like Unity or UE4, it doesn’t provide for instance built-in pathfinding or lighting systems, even if we can’t say that it only provides low level features, it’s not so far from it. So I spent some significant time working on basic features like navigation mesh generation, scene graph creation, media management, pathfinding system, collisions, animations, etc… And of course it took me some time to implement and optimize the line of sight and lighting system, which actually is not working at all like the one in Monaco.
A navigation mesh
Another big part of the game we’ve been working on since the beginning is the level editor. LOVE is just an engine, and is not editor driven like Unity for instance, so to be able to test the game, one of the first thing to do was to create the editor. It’s completely integrated, you can access it any time while playing to modify something and then resume the game. Of course the main idea here is to provide it with the finished game allowing everybody to create their levels and share them.
In-game editor view
Something else we worked on almost from the beginning is the multiplayer support, as it’s a lot easier to start to implement everything with the multiplayer constraint in mind than adding it once everything is already done. And I must admit that I’m quiet happy with the whole network system we’ve setup, it’s flexible and it can support dedicated servers if needed.
2 players in co-op
And finally we already worked a lot on game mechanisms like equipments support (lures, EMP grenades, Blink, etc… We’ll talk further about it on another post), players movements (with keyboard/mouse and gamepad support), visibility management, guards AI, cameras, lasers, level interactions, etc…
Aiming before throwing a sound lure
So, what’s missing? Well, a lot of course… We need to do a lot of polishing, we have no sounds or musics yet, we still have a lot of ideas to make the game better and more fun, we have a whole solo campaign to create as well as multiplayer maps. To summarize, it’s still far from being finished but we’ve already built solid basis.
Actually, our current plan is to have a first playable demo in the next couple of months including a “clean” user experience with some tutorial missions acting as a mini solo campaign and some multiplayer maps to start to organize playtesting sessions. Once this version is done, we’ll see how it’s received and start to plan the full game production.
Meanwhile, you can expect from us updates on the game status and other devlogs about technical topics, gameplay discussions or anything else.
Community
