Hi! 👾

It’s time to talk about the project. I want to share my thoughts, ideas and process while developing my biggest project.

I’ve been developing the game for a few months, trying to build a solid foundation to be able to get it where I want it to be.

game-loop(s)

The more specific genre of the game would be survival-horror.

I feel very inspired by SCP and the backrooms. What I have in mind is a proper survival game that occurs within some rules inspired by the backrooms as the environment and some creatures or entities that could fit into the SCP categories. With that said, some the known popular elements will be present in the game, but I’m designing my own rules, places and entities.

There are two main ways of playing the game: the stories and survival mode.

The stories are a collection of adventures with scripted events and such. This is a way of presenting the universe of the game telling the player about some rules, levels and entities presented in thl. The gameplays of alpha v5 and alpha v12 were some of the examples that would fit into the ‘stories’ category.

Survival is the core mode of the game. The player will be able to try to survive in the universe of thl by crafting, building, gathering and exploring the levels of the game. Procedural generation and RPG elements are key components of survival mode. Items, rooms, entities and other stuff from the stories will be present in survival mode.

All of this will be shown in a retro style. I personally love the PSX style, and with modern lighting techniques and proper physics, I want to develop the game in a PSX++ style: low poly, low resolution assets within an interactable, inmersive world environment. This lets me iterate through asset creation faster and let the engine deal with the rendering and physics of the environment.

current-state

The foundation of the game it getting close to be complete. I still need add a few things and debug some systems.

What does this means exactly? The game will be still in alpha, as I develop the game systems I need to test, fix, add and change pretty much everything. That’s why I choose to remain in the alpha stage. This stage is probably earlier than ‘early access’, but as an indie solo developer is crucial to start sharing my game and progress as soon as possible.

The game is being developed in the Godot Engine. Right now the latest stable version is 4.1.2, with 4.2 around the corner. Godot Engine is changing and improving a lot with every update. With their four months development cycle, every four months we get a new fresh update with new features and improvements. These are vital to project-thl. Godot is in a very good spot right now, but it’s getting better very quickly. And the project can benefit a lot from every engine upgrade.

One main thing about the current Godot Engine is Godot Physics. The physics engine is very important in project-thl as I want the game to feel very interactable for the player. Godot Physics can improve a lot, and other alternatives are being worked on, such as Jolt Physics. I will probably switch to Jolt when is integrated within Godot itself as it seems to be very good.

Other elements very important that will improve with new Godot releases are path-finding and animations. Navigation is marked as experimental in Godot right now. I will start using it but that means that it can change in the future and I will need to update the systems if something breaks. Animations are changing a bit in Godot 4.2 and I need to learn how to use some new animation mixing system that Godot is introducing.

At this moment, I have developed many core systems of the game such as:

• Game Manager
• Resource Manager
• First Person Controller
• Interaction System
• Container/Inventory System
• Audio System
• Notifications System (inside the game)
• Basic User Configuration
• Scattering System
• Map Generating System
• Level changing System

The majority of the systems are in v1, but some have been developed a bit more. There are many challenges on developing those systems. I want to be able to reuse some of those system in other projects, such as the Scatter, Interaction and Map Generation systems. Also the core systems needs to be stable and reliable such as the Game Manager, the Resource Manager and more.

For now, pretty much all of them seems to be working fine in basic scenes 🤞. That’s why I think that the base foundation of the game is getting close to finish, and from there I will upgrade the systems when needed, with new features and functionalities.

AI is still in a very early stage. Implementing basic AI is not as hard (i.e. an enemy running towards you), but for more complex behaviors it needs to be a scalable system. I’m using state machines for AI, although this may change in the future.

There are many other systems either planned, designed or being developed like: player stats manager, ranged and melee weapons, character creation, architecture system, crafting, elevator system, etc. I will talk about those when the time comes as releases go out.

releases

I want to start releasing alpha versions as soon as possible, but I want to do it when I have a bit of gameplay to share. Development of the first story of the game is being made right now, and as I announced in a previous devlog, it will be a remake of the Alpha v12, where the player can explore different scenes. This will fit into the stories mode of the game.

The survival mode need a bit of work yet. I want a few systems developed before I publish any survival mode access (i.e. player stats manager, crafting system…).

Devlogs like this one will be more common from now on. I want to start sharing news around the project so you know exactly how things are going.

In terms of “when” a release will be uploaded to itch, I want to say one every two months max, aiming to one every month. But this will change a lot depending on my development cycles of this and other projects.

Remember: I am a solo indie developer and right now I have very little revenue. That’s something I can live with in the short term, for a while. But I want to make a living out of selling games and assets. So the first release of the alphas will have a low entry price, and once you pay, you will gain access to future itch updates.

other-projects

I don’t want to put all of my eggs in one basket. That’s why I’m planning and doing other projects in order to get revenue. The projects mainly are: other smaller games and 3D Assets.

Creating 3D assets in order to use them in my games and publish them to be sold is another way of getting revenue for me. As I get better making 3D assets, I will publish and sell them.

Other projects are on the pre-production phase while I concentrate all of my efforts on this one. But this is not my only project in mind. I am planning to publish a game on Android, probably a free game with a few ads to get revenue. Godot seems to work on the web and I want to publish a web version as a demo here on itch. More on that coming at the beginning of 2024.

See you soon!