I've been essentially using the spoilers channel of my Discord as a blog up to this point, but I thought it'd be worthwhile to begin using an actual blog site again for archive purposes as well as being able to make the content more available to everyone interested.
So this first post is just everything I've posted to my Discord so far as well as some private posts I made before that in chronological order, starting from the first post. And an explanation of the initial intention of the game. If you just want to see the pictures, you can skip over this first section. Enjoy!
Art
Initial thoughts:
Lets do a game with an art style that we can handle doing on our own for the most part. Inspiration for the original art style was Among Us. I personally do programming as my full-time job as well as on every game I've worked on, so this time around I want to do mostly art. We decided to go with the Universal Render Pipeline because we knew it was the standard Unity would be pushing and we wanted to get used to it, but also so we had access to new features such as Shader Graph. The performance gain was a bonus but not the driving cause. Although after we learned of the performance differences we made a joke that the game should be able to "Run on a phone", although we didn't necessarily intend for it to be available on mobile.
Reality since then:
We're still dedicated to doing an art style that we can manage in-house but are no longer opposed to using third party assets. As polishing has continued the realization of just how many things fall under the umbrella of 'art' continued to grow and I knew that I wouldn't be able to dedicate the time both to creation and utilization. You'll notice the game using all original assets from the very beginning but by the time it goes 3D we rely more and more on them. At first it was just special effects, then textures, and finally models. The game originally was going to be solely 2D and hand-drawn similar to Among Us. After awhile, we decided that because we hadn't fully settled on an art style that quick iteration was important and switched to a 2D tilemap. This is where we learned of the shadow limitations of the built-in Unity tilemap. I considered programming a map editor that generated 3D meshes projected 2D orthographic so that we could use built-in 3D shadows but one of the big inspirations of this project was to be something much more simple and easy to work on than previous games. But we thought lighting was important enough for us to switch from 2D to 3D since 2D tilemaps inside of Unity didn't yet contain this functionality.
Originally we were just going to be "3D" but 2D projected using things like wall prefabs. But I pitched to Phineas: "What if we did a 2D/3D mix like Wolfenstein or DOOM"? The idea was that interactable or important objects would be 2D and the scene would be 3D. He agreed, although later I found out he still thought we were going to be orthographic so it took some convincing to try out this new art style where it was a 2D & 3D mix. In these posts you'll see us transition from 2D to 3D as well as experiment with the perspective we want in 3D. I give props to Phineas since I was doing art & he was programming, he had to redo several systems to convert them from 2D to 3D. We also originally wanted the map to operate on a relatively flat surface so later when we added more verticality he had to reprogram things to support that as well.
It was Phineas who also pitched the idea of having guns be 3D which at the time I wasn't able to visualize, but since has proven to be what I consider a very good idea. Later when I implemented animations I was very happy that I wouldn't have to learn 2D animating since I already knew 3D.
Gameplay
Initial thoughts:
Waves of zombies like in Call of Duty, but using Team Fortress 2-like classes. We also want to do something a little more unique where the map is divided into sections and if you zombies overrun a section, you no longer own it, and your goal is to defend all the sections of the map. Each section has some sort of benefit to the player that is lost when zombies overrun it, although they can "repair" that section so it's not lost permanently if you're able to recapture it.
Reality since then:
Waves of zombies like in call of duty and using TF2-like classes has remained the same, but we eventually got rid of the zones idea. I don't quite remember why we abandoned it. I had many ideas of "Constant events" inspired by Among Us such as having to now & then repair the water pipes or a section of the map would become flooded but we ended up scrapping that to, although I'm still fairly confident it might see an appearance in the game after the first map.
Notes on development
The reason I'd had the idea of using classes alongside zombies was because of Team Fortress 2. Every year for around the last 6 years I kept trying to get into the game but I never enjoyed playing it, even though I really wanted to like it. Eventually after several years of trying (about 100 hours worth by early this year) it finally clicked for me and I began really enjoying it. My current main is the demoman and I now have, at the time of writing this, 538 hours in the game.
You might not believe this but the *original original* pitch of the game was to be something we could make in a couple of weeks. Phineas was taking a road-trip with his family and I suggested that they swing by Michigan and drop him off, I'd pay for the ticket for him to fly back after a couple of weeks. That gave us a deadline to work towards. But once he got here, and we actually had to spend time to decide what the heck it was we were making, we decided to for something longer.
Up to this point I finally got Phineas into TF2 and we were playing together regularly. So while at my house it became a habit for us to work for a few hours, play a competitive match of TF2, then repeat. The first ~4 days or so of him being here we were still coming up with ideas so it's no wonder we eventually landed on a game with TF2-like classes. I even bought a white board for us to use, on one side my stuff, on the other side his stuff.
The original 3 classes of the game were going to be Engineer, Demoman, and Soldier. But we eventually landed on Demoman/Demoknight hybrid, Engineer, and Ranger. Because these classes were so heavily TF2 inspired, and because we knew that previous games had used Valve IP (Such as "Hunt Down The Freeman") I decided to get in contact with Valve about having the game legally take place in the TF2 universe, in a parallel reality of course, nothing canon. They said no, which we figured would be the case, but it doesn't hurt to ask. Although the criteria they used to say no was interesting and gave leeway to potential other games that could, just not this one. So who knows maybe a Blake Gillman game might someday take place in the Valve universe.
That all being said, I've been very happy with how development has been going. In the last month or so, some major changes to gameplay have had to occur as in play testing and design planning I've discovered that there wasn't enough for the classes to do, and that with the way we had things planned that if a team didn't have an Engineer they'd be pretty screwed. So I've been spending a lot of time on the white board planning more things and we've recently begun work on a tablet that should help balance that by giving non-engineer classes access to some of the things that were originally engineer only as well as a few other cool things that we can now add because of it.
Last thing I have to say before getting to the posts is a reminder that my focus on this project was to be anything but the programming. To learn all the various aspects of game development that I had neglected (Although as an indie developer, still knew a moderate amount about). Previous games sound effects & visual effects were just quickly thrown on afterward because that's just what you're supposed to do. But with Phineas taking care of 70% of programming (I still do some) I've been able to really focus on it and get better at it. Everything from audio priority, volume, UI, visual effects and feedback, even game design I've gotten a lot better at and spent plenty of time watching GDC lectures on.
So now, enjoy all the posts that show development from the very beginning to now.
Development posts
Post Key:
D: Came from public Discord
P: Private post I made to friends or whatnot (There are plenty of those, so I only chose ones I thought were interesting in one way or another)
P > 10/23/20
Original quick art concepts for the game
A progression of the main character's design, ended up going with a variation of the 2nd to last
First public post. Asking which of these 3D perspectives people like more. Originally we were going to have a standard walk animation with the legs but inspired by Among Us & RimWorld I decided to go with a legless bobbing. File sizes had to fit Discords 8Mb limit, so quality is reduced.
