Hello people!
I am here to show my project that is currently on early development, with focus on conceptual design an little prototype programming. I am making it all by myself on spare time, so it may evolute slowly, but better than nothing!
Year 2112 is an sci-fi game that is inspired by some songs by the band Rush and other progressive rock bands, which often presents themes like interplanetary voyages, conflicts among separate forces, and so on. This game will not be a direct translation of the song 2112 or any other song, but expect light references from these songs -the
story is going to be short, with some player motivation and some events, with world and characters primarily based on said musics. I want to make a narrative that is very simple, so I can work well on details. Also, I don't want to interrupt the game flow with storytelling if it is not strictly necessary, so an intro, an ending and collectible story material gained in game and accessible through menus is probably all this game would need.
The game itself will be some mix of run and jump games, like Canabalt, with horizontal shooters, like Gradius, with crawling and looting action games, lke Borderlands, with... photography!?!?
Well, I don't think this explains much, so I'll go into details:
The
gameplay will change between running and flying - when the character, called Yunji, is on ground, she's on a stealth state where many enemies have difficulties seeing her, so she may go around unnoticed. When running, she has a limited set of actions, like jumping, photographing, and melee attacking close enemies she passes by. Of course, some actions like attacking my show her position to enemies.
After jumping, Yunji can start her jetpack and start flying around. This usually ends her stealth, but allows her hack and slash freely, moving around the entire screen and shooting her weapons. When the player stops controlling the flying Yunji, she will enter a short moment of stability on air, and then will fall back to the running state.
To enhance the character's abilities, there will be to main things, common in the RPG world - items and skills.
My
item system is going to be simple: there are some equipment that can be changed, like shields or weapons, some fixed equipments that can be only tweaked or upgraded, and there are parts that can be used to assemble new items. The main difference here is how the items are obtained - the best ones will be available by assembly, and to make these items you'll need some kind of blueprint that tells you how to make them. And how can you acquire these blueprints? Well, just find an enemy who has this item and photograph it to see how the item was made. Why is it like this? Because I think we need more photography in games lol.
My
skill system is based on the common skill trees, which everyone knows from a myriad of commercial and independent games out there. But, in my case, instead of 3 separate trees, I have 4, forming a circle, so every two holds a set of shared skills. I'm calling this the Skill Circle (very creative name, don't you think?). Most of the skills have to be unlocked using the classical points gained on level up, but then, they are upgrade by use - the more you use this skill, the better it gets.
The four sides of the Skill Circle holds the main skill categories for Yunji, each with subcategories: North is Mobility, with skills that define both how well she flies (maneuvering) and how well she acts on stealth; West is Combat, with enhancements for gunfire, melee fight and elemental attributes; South is Body, which manages the character's weaponry and gear (which ones can she use, at which level, how effective they are, and so on); the last side, the East, is the Expertise, where skills define Yunji's training in photography, engineering (creating and upgrading items) and hacking (affecting and changing things in environment).
The Skill Circle is definitely the thing I am mostly working on, and it will change a lot, specially with feedback from people here (when I work a little more on it and share the details). The most important things here, for me, is make the circle well balanced, without dominating builds that make all others useless, and giving the player different play styles - I will only be happy if the game is balanced enough to give the possibility to a player to have fun using only flying, only stealth, great photography skills with poor combat, and other crazy builds like that.
Another thing I am working on is the world traversing (not ure how I should call this) - the way the
stages go one after another, and how they will be connected and inserted in a world. I'm trying to give the stages a feel of metroidvania and dungeoncrawlers, with both the chance to explore the world through forking paths, and the good old randomly generated lands to wander on. This is something that I'll probably post separately later, but yes, I have thought on ways of doing that in a game where you constantly move forward :D
Well, for each one of these "features" I described, I'll probably spend a lot of time trying to make things integrate better and smoother, for a nice gaming experience. I don't want it to be the best game ever, don't want to become rich with it, I just want to take some crazy ideas out of my mind and turn them to something concrete the best possible way :D
I started making a prototype in Cocos2d-x HTML5, but then I noticed it was very slow on mobile devices, so I ported it to the C++ version of the engine. If you want to play with it,
click here, but remember, it is very early in development, so many of the mechanics aren't implemented, and graphics are all Megaman placeholders xD - controls are classic WASD, to start flying just "double jump" with W. Plus, you can use the javascript console and play with everything you can find in the GameManager variable.
Thank you, I will try to keep everything up to date here! Would love to see some feedback too :D