Week 1

Welcome to the first devlog for our Awful Summer Jam 2018 entry! We don't have a name for it yet, but I (Makhor) like to call it "CITY DEATH KILL" or "CDK", for short.

I've got a lot to talk about, so let's jump straight into the original concept, and how much it changed as the first week went by.

CONCEPT:

The original concept was to make a sequel to GTA Advance, the GTA game that was exclusive to the GBA, but with more ridicolous
gun fights and abilities (Slow mo and dashes being the key abilities).

After I started implementing stuff like slow mo and the enemies, I realized that enemies were making "bullet hell" type patterns with their bullets and that it was really fun to fight a bunch of enemies while dodging bullets and slowing down time like a madman, so I told the team that instead of making a shallow open world game, we make a cool arena shooter with cool bullet hell type combat, and we all agreed. But, if it is not GTA advance 2, then what game is it trying to make a sequel of? Hotline Miami. in Hotline Miami you fight people in apartments so the obvious evolution is fighting people on the streets. Done (but seriously, the game is gonna take a lot of heavy aesthetic inspiration from HM, so expect that).

MECHANICS AND FEATURES:

I have been the one who has coded most of the major gameplay features up until this point, so I can tell you all a lot about them and how they work!

The first mechanic I added was the dodge/roll/dash/dive/what (none of us know what it is exactly) and it's really simple! it doubles your speed for a certain amount of time and you can't get hit while using it! We're still debating how we're gonna limit it, so expect to see more of that this week.

via Gfycat

The second mechanic I implemented was slow mo and it was a lot easier to implement than what I expected! So, while the player is pressing shift everything goes slow (bullets and enemies) but you still go fast! So you can go up to someone's face and blast them over with a shotgun blast!

via Gfycat

The third mechanic I added this week was NPCs and how they react to being shot. There are two types of NPCs: aggressive and non-aggresive. non-aggresive NPCs just run when they hear gunfire, but aggresive NPCs will shoot back. But here's the thing, an NPC could shoot another NPC, and that NPC would begin to shoot back at the NPC! This makes for some interesting bullet dodging moments and also ties into another mechanic we're gonna add this week, so stay tuned for that!

GRAPHICS AND ART:

We've been using temporary art up until this point, so you won't be seeing cool character sprites or maps. BUT, we do have some cool effects to show off!

via Gfycat

While I was working on core gameplay, our other programmer called OtherThatGuy (confusing, I know) was working on some neato 3d effects that give buildings more depth and scale, making it look a lot more like GTA 2. As you can see, it's pretty hecking cool. He's also working on some other cool graphic stuff so expect to see more of that in the future.

And our artist, Punstar, made these character drawings during the original concept phase, and we're defenetily keeping this character style for the final game. Expect some more cool art from Pun in future devlogs(Also follow him on twitter for more cool drawings).

MUSIC AND SOUND:

There is no sound so far.... but our composer, Osmium, has been hard at work figuring out the style of music for the game's radio(and yes, the game has a radio instead of music specific to each level, more on that later). And while I can't show you a lot of the music stuff, here's a small WIP sample:

Click here for sick jams.

Also, there may be a certain someone that could potentially do some guest tracks for the game... But you'll have to wait for more info on that!

CONCLUSION:

And that's it for our weekly devlog! I hope you enjoyed it! I think we have been making a lot of good progress (especially for our first week) and we can't wait to showcase more exciting stuff this week and finish the game so you can play it and blast people away in STYLE. See ya!