Hello there.
I'm doing a game inspired by the Fallout series for the lore, and originally inspired by a lot of top-down shooters for the gameplay, but then Nuclear Throne happened and I'm taking inspiration and borrowing features/mechanics mostly from it.
Basically, it's a top-down shooter in a post-apocalyptic infinite procedural world, with mechanics similar to NT but with slower iteration (you won't die too often) and simple survival elements. The map, characters and weapons are going to be procedurally generated.
Controls are very important for me. I am very picky when it comes to responsivity so I'm making sure the game will run at high frequency and I'm also including options to configure it for your personal tastes, for example you can enable hardware cursor so even if vsync is on and your monitor is 60hz or if the game has some slowdown, the mouse responsivity will be fine. Hardware cursors are limited in size, so for high-resolutions it's not recommended. But if you have a high-resolution and high-frequency screen, probably your PC won't have problems running the game at high frequency (or 144hz vsynced) since I'm optimizing the hell outta it and the graphics are low-poly (toon stylized). But the option is there in any case. Also, all the game 'logic' is distributed on the frames. If you run the game @ 10khz, the bullets will still travel a tiny bit every frame, their positions will never repeat on two independent frames.
The gameplay is basically similar to NT but with much more 'depth' and there are some extra mechanics. It's nothing too complex like Project Zomboid though. Everything is very simple and it's very 'light' on the strategy part, but (hopefully) very challenging. I'm doing everything procedural because exploration is going to be fundamental, and since you're exploring a world that has already been scavenged, the resources on the map are very limited and NPCs are very aggressive at this point (in the lore there's no way to produce more food). So, basically, you'll find villages (big cities were destroyed) and suburban areas, scavenge the few resources that are left there, fight and loot some NPCs, perhaps sleep a little, and probably never come back.
Even though I have some experience with procedural generation, the map generation is much harder than I though, especially because it's incremental and persistent.
Procedural Generators Status:
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Characters
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Map
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-Open Areas
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-Geographical Features
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-Macroscale Map Features
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I don't have much to show at the moment, and I don't want to spoil the game, so I'm careful with what I share.
This tweet (my first ever) is a recoil test. It's not much but it shows the basic idea of the mechanics.
I have some more gifs and images, but I guess that since I'm new here I don't have permission to upload them yet.
At the moment I'm accepting suggestions on the overall 'purpose' of the game. The basic story is that your character have 'something' that can save the world. And you're on a journey to find people able to use that thing you have to actually do that. Throughout the game you'll find clues (puzzles) and friendly NPCs who will help you pinpoint the location of the people who can save the world, but so far that's about it.
I don't know what's the best approach to add more sense of purpose to the game, I thought about some procedural side-quests like helping some friendly NPCs but I want to keep them to an extreme minimum (no more than 50 of them for the whole game, some can join you and fight by your side).
The game is self-funded at the moment. I'm doing freelance work and I develop this game when I'm not working. It's hard to develop like that and as soon as I have something playable I'll look for some kind of investor to help me pay my basic expenses so I can develop the game faster. I know that's going to be very hard especially because I don't have a strong presence online. If that doesn't happen I wouldn't mind keeping all the revenue too
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Any input is really appreciated. Thank you in advance.
Community
