Hello TIGSource Community,
I wanted to create this devlog for a while. I had to wait for the artist responsible for that logo above to be proud of her work first
Fire Exit: a nervous end-of-the-world crisis management game.The planet is at the end of its life, burning, and the earthlings have no other choice but flee from it. Hopefully (and weirdly?) they had expected it and have a bunch of rockets ready to take off that just need their passengers before doing so.
Your job is to keep the path between the people and the rockets free from fire or other obstacles to save as many people as you can.
Beware: the rocket will take off as soon as fire touches its launchpad, as a security measure!
Currently, the tools you have at your disposal to help you in this task are:
=>A squadron of water bombers to slow down fire's progress
=>A team of lumberjacks to clear a forest that's in the path of the people (those earthlings are so panicked, they couldn't find their way in the middle of a forest!)
=>Arrows to force the earthlings down a more secure path
And more to come.
Work on this game started almost a year agoThis game's development began as a game jam game during a 2-day game jam on the French website
Développez.com. During this particular jam, everyone had to follow a common theme, which was:
"It's the end of the World!".
After a short brain-storming with myself, during which I thought of doing an overcooked-like (because I wanted to make a game like that at that time) but without any idea really compelling, I came up with an idea that had some vibes of Chu Chu Rocket and Lemmings: guide a crowd of people, too panicked to take care of themselves, to a rocket that will let them escape the planet.
Biiscuit (who I can't reference because she doesn't publish her work online... yet), my artist and my partner in life, created the art in her free time during those two days.
The game originally looked like
this (that clip is from a stream of another programmer during the jam, who tested all the other games at the end. I don't know why it cut so abruptly at the end, the stream was originally longer.) Originally, there were only the water bombers, and the game was nervous enough, but you wouldn't expect it to be much more than a small mobile game.
I took some time to make it better, prettier, and cleaner, and spent some months making a level editor which I hope to be able to ship with the finished game. I documented some bits of my progress in
a YouTube playlist.
What's to comeI'm aiming to release a two-level demo in a few weeks. For this, I made a quite polished menu that still needs some more visual details, and I will polish two levels that will showcase two of the first tools you will have to use in the full game (the water bombers and the lumberjacks), as well as a glimpse of the chaos the game will throw you into (the fire spreading, the crowd screaming and burning, rockets taking off, and some scripts that will add to the overall chaos).
On the technology sideI'm making this game using a custom engine that I've been developing through the years, written in C/C++, which uses either OpenGL3 or D3D12 as a rendering backend,
SoLoud as its sound engine, dearimgui for debug tools and for Fire Exit's embedded level editor, and a few other libs (libpng, nunicode, freetype, rapidjson).
It also features a custom scripting language called
ceq. I began creating my own scripting language because, when doing a state of the art when I needed a scripting solution for another project, I found that they were either bloated or way too rich for my need; All I needed was being able to script a sequence of events. I first announced it
here. Because I would love to make it available publicly, I have set up a
Patreon and a
Liberapay account to be able to get support for dedicating more of my time to completing it. Feel free to give your support if it's something that you would also be interested in
Fire Exit makes a heavy use of this scripting language - for controlling how each tile reacts to fire, for adding events inside a level, for controlling the behaviour of tools... -, so giving your support will also help in the development of Fire Exit, by making it the proof of concept of a commercial game using ceq
On the Art sideBiiscuit, who was already therefor the prototype, will hopefully create and enhance all the necessary sprites in her free time (she's currently working full time in a sign company). I'll try to keep the sprite count low enough to shorten the development time, which will be a challenge because I would love each map to be a recognizable place of the actual world.
On the sound design and music front, I'm sorry for the souls of sound designers and composers out there, but for now I will live by Jeff Vogel's words in his GDC talk (I'm not putting the link because the forum will automatically embed it :/) ("Don't be afraid to be cheap!"), that will mean basic sound design and royalty free music; I hope to make this better if this game generates any revenue
Here are the most short term improvements I have to do:
=>Currently, burning people don't look like they're burning anymore because of a lot of other changes (improvement of fire, the way people are animated...) This will come back, and look better than before.
=>The ground tiles are currently implemented in a naïve way, and can't be modified through the editor. I don't know exactly what I will do about this.
=>Some improvements of the main menu
After this, hopefully I will be able to improve the levels and then release the promised demo
In the meantime, please post some feedback if you have anything to say, not only about the game but also with my use of the English language in this post, or if there's anything hard to understand.
See you!