Introduction
Hey I'm Nathan, I've been learning everything game development in my spare time for the last 8 years. Modeling, sculpting, texture painting, level design, narrative writing, programming and animation. For roughly the last 2 years I've been working on my first commercial project Dungeon Isles.
Dungeon Isles is a first person fantasy action-adventure game taking place on a forsaken island shrouded in mystery and horror. Discover ancient secrets protected by colossal golems in dungeons and survive the harsh landscape and ruins overrun by hordes of demons, that were the old village inhabitants now blinded, tortured and twisted into monsters.
Single Player Adventure
The Single player story takes place across 5 major dungeons, and a harsh island landscape covered in village ruins and large ancient structures.
The Temple Dungeon - The starting dungeon of the game. The higher levels appear simply as a temple of worship of various means over the millennia but the lower levels hide an ancient dungeon protecting the secrets and capabilities of the island.
The Village Ruins - Village Ruins are where you’ll often discover events linked to your forgotten past and encounter hordes of demons.
The Ancient Ruins & Devices - Large ancient structures and devices are found across the island, some of them are remnants of a town, colosseum or powerful devices for altering the environment.
(Story Change) So I’ve made some story changes, dropping a major side character. The undead lich was an antagonist/ ally character that was supposed to have a bit of dark humor but was mainly there for exposition. I’ve designed a lot more of the story details throughout the environment instead, and it lends to a more consistent theme and feel throughout the game.
Enemy Progress
Over the last few months I made a prototype that had most of (the very rough) animations for the golem, a good chunk of it’s AI done and combat that’s pretty functional where it’s animations and attack patterns change based on what limbs it has.
Recently I’ve made progress on the Rock Golem, getting the model to a near final look with a first iteration of the destruction for the limbs. After I work on a new particle shader and textures a bit, along with some better sound effects, I’ll be making final animations, AI and tuning combat to release in a demo.
Later this year I’ll begin work on some of the smaller demons in the game. The ones that use to be normal folk living in the now destroyed ruins before they were gruesomely altered.
Gameplay Updates
A few things I’ve had done for awhile are the Heavy Bow (which will change design) functional with different rune augmentations and - a warp/ dash like ability and ledge grabbing are setup for traversing the environment. The HUD is mostly functional but there's been a recent design change so a couple things are changing there.
Next I’ll be focusing on putting together a small dungeon that I’ll expand on for probably the entirety of development as I’ll release monthly demos of it soon, showing more and more mechanics or experimenting with fun ideas.
What's Next
For now my primary focus will be getting more dungeon gameplay setup and a small demo to get some feedback on. After that I’ll get back to animating the golem and finishing the AI. Then back to working on dungeon gameplay to flesh out a combat encounter with the golem. After those my focus will move to completing much more of the landscape with it’s ancient ruins and old villages and getting the common demons of the game fully realized and combat ready for a public demo.
Finding the Game Over a Year of Prototyping
A little over 2 years ago I essentially started what become Dungeon Isles, experimenting with different genres and platforms. Early on I was aiming to make a cRPG for PC, Consoles and Mobile with a lot of emphasis on shaping the environment constructively and destructively through puzzles, combat and story choices, but as I realized a few months into the project I was getting too ambitious I wanted to see what I could make on the Gear VR we had just got. I came up with a first person, bow shooting, action adventure game to make for mobile VR platforms and after release when I could afford an Oculus Rift and new PC I planned to upgrade and expand the project for all the higher end VR platforms. The game then revolved around exploring one expansive dungeon, fighting an army of varied mages and creatures in service to a powerful lich and soon started going by the name Forsaken Isles till not too long ago I realized the name's basically taken already and changed it to Dungeon Isles.
Finally almost a year ago I settled on the game concept for Dungeon Isles as it is today. The game starts with a lot of mystery so I'm trying to be careful what information I give out. Dungeon Isles largely revolves around puzzle solving, manipulating the environment, combat against blind humanoid demons, varied golem boss battles where they can manipulate the environment quite a bit too, which their fights will generally play out as multi stage battles and finally exploring the island and dungeons trying to find the keys to your escape and discover the past.
Community
Within a couple months I’ll have enough of a small dungeon for people to mess with a few mechanics and I look forward to talking with everyone about feedback and ideas. You can find out more and keep up to date on news and content through my Discord, Facebook, Twitter, Website and Newsletter.
A Little Bit About Me
I was born in 94 and my earliest favorite games were sonic the hedgehog and crash bandicoot since we had a Sega and a PS1. I believe in 2008 I finally got God of War 1 and 2 and watching the behind the scenes to those games is what really sparked my desire to develop video games. Watching Unreal Engine 3 tech demos for Gears of War 2 drove me to sell my xbox 360 a couple years later to get a cheap graphics card (GT 430) and assets for Unity to start my game development journey.
I was first introduced to Blender in 2010 but didn't start using it or Unity till 2011 when Unity 3.3 was out. I tried starting with UDK to learn development but it was still too demanding for the family computer back then.
I'm hoping to release a couple Pre-Alpha demos of my game this year along with a kickstarter campaign.
Final Notes
I’ll probably still struggle to find consistency in being able to release updates or work on the game for some more months it seems, but at least it is improving. Now I’m aiming to release a Dev Log every month. Definitely don’t want to go 5 months again before an update.
Also just wanted to say Thank You if you’ve cared to read much of this. I’m excited to share the next Dev Log soon and release the first Pre-Alpha Demo to newsletter subscribers.
Community
