Unnecessary introduction: Hey there! I've got my own devlog on my website, but that one is more for general use than a devlog here would be. It's also a bit wordy. I figure here I could post more pictures and fewer words so anyone interested could follow along and/or give me tips or opinions as I move through the process../Gather (pronounced "dot-slash gather") is a 3rd-person atmospheric exploration/collect-a-thon/discovery kind of game in which the player takes control of a little robot who needs to recover pieces of its crashed ship with the help of the ship's sassy mainframe AI from a world comprised of islands floating above a mysterious, corrosive fog. While collecting your ship's pieces, your robot has also taken upon itself the task of researching the world and collecting samples from its plants, geography, and ancient ruins. As a worker robot, you have no weapons, so you must fly away and outmaneuver the bird-riding reptilian natives of the land when they spot you and begin attacking. While collecting and researching, you will also find things that can be used to upgrade your robot so you can get places you couldn't previously go.
The goal of the game is to give the player a clear objective but give an interesting enough environment to allow the player to branch out and let their curiosity discover a whole other story amidst the ancient ruins. Any upgrades the player can get are designed to not be essential to beating the game (collecting all ship parts and leaving), but my hope is that the player will quickly see that that's not the point of the game. Instead, the upgrades are to help the player find everything that there is to discover hidden throughout the world. I'm also planning on having a pretty in-depth Metroid Prime-esque scanning and logging system where the player can learn everything they could possibly want to learn about the world they're playing in if they so desire. So while the player only needs to repair the ship to finish the game, the real aim is to create a world with mysteries to engage the player's curiosity so they can discover secrets and have a memorable experience that allows their imagination to fill in gaps that the game doesn't explicitly provide details for.
So far, I have basic movement for the robot finished and have started modeling in order to give myself an idea of where the game will end up. I also recently teamed up with a guy who contacted me to help with story elements, and working with him has really helped give the game and environment a dark, intriguing feel, like something terrible happened in this otherwise breathtaking place.
Here are some gifs and images of my progress so far, from oldest to newest
(All graphics are placeholder unless stated otherwise. Also, the gifs are tiny because they're from Tumblr, which used to restrict gif sizes to 1MB):
Camera and flight:
Inventory:
Player character 1st concept art:
Player character base model:
I'm planning to do hand-painted textures for this game. I know it will take a long time (and especially longer since I'm not an artist), but based on my
first attempts at hand-painting seamless textures, I think it'll look pretty cool as long as I take my time and make sure it's as good as I can possibly make it.
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