First Devlog: Deadeye Desperado

For the last two weeks, Deadeye Desperado has been in production. It is a First Person Shooter with a matching mechanic, set in the wild west with a magical twist.

The core mechanic revolves around your bullets being color coded to enemy body parts. Matching a bullet to a body part ups your combo. Progressing through a combo gives you minor passive effects like slow and minor heals, while getting the 6th shot in your combo gives you a major active effect like an explosion or freeze. 

A secondary, but major mechanic is the ability to manually revolve the cylinder. This allows you to choose the bullet you want to fire at any point, and gives the player more freedom overall.

We completed 20 of the 25 tasks assigned in this first sprint, which is a great pace for my team to be on. Some of the members have not worked on games before, or have little experience with exactly what they are doing. With this in mind, i'm blown away by the progress my team has made in these two short weeks.

2D Art

2D art was a key department to get off the ground early. Everything that has gone through them has been concept art thus far, and I have a few nice pieces of their art to show off today. These, in addition to images found on the web that help represent the style of the game, serve as the basis of the art style and overall theme.

Here, we have the golem enemies. These will be changed slightly to final form, but there are some key points here which will run true. The crystals on the golems will remain constant, as a sort of power source or energy conduit. In addition, the separated limbs are going to be key to help players tell them apart.

This piece of art, along with the next piece, give us a good definition for how our revolver will look. From this image, you can see the runes along the side of the barrel, and the crystals hanging from the gun. These give it a great magical feel, and for a central piece that is crucial.

This image is the on the final gun is based off of. It is a Colt Single Action Army Revolver. The reason i chose this gun is because it was widely produced and has many wonderfully engraved versions for reference. In addition it has a unique reloading system that uses a loading gate. This allows the user to load one bullet at a time into the revolver, rather than tossing the whole magazine each time. This will be crucial for allowing the player freedom with which bullets they fire when, and allows them to save bullets for when they want them.

Animation

Animation worked primarily on blocked out animations using default free rigs. These included the gun and hand animations as well as the golem enemy animations. A few of which you can see here.

I wish i could show you the golem blockouts, but i do not have links to them at this time, and i cannot upload the videos i do have to this site.

Level Design

Level Design had a focus of mainly maps and ideas this first sprint, also focusing on getting asset lists developed for their levels along the way.

This is one example of a Puzzle Room in the game. The idea in this one being that you enter this room, your bullets all turn blue with the freeze effect, and you must solve the puzzle to escape. This one revolves around slowing and stopping the minecarts while hitting them in a specific order. This effectively teaches the blue bullet and gives it to the player as a reward, adding it to their arsenal. 

We have many other maps like this in the pipeline, and even variants of each color to make sure we get a solid idea in the end. All of these revolve around hitting the crystals in a particular order. There are always six, and some require you to hit the final crystal with a 6 shot combo.

We also have some maps for the overall flow of the level, and how rooms will be linked.

3D Art

3D artist were split into working on environment assets and the first person assets.

We had one artist working on the pistol model seen above, with an animator/rigger by his side to make sure it was all hunky dory for him. In addition we had an amazing spread of universal game assets crated by our other modeler.

These include the assets you can see above. A crystal that will be used for the crystal puzzles. Four variants of a desert rock to be used throughout the game. A crate and a barrel to be used as set dressing. A lot of their work this sprint also revolved around getting an art style conceptualized. We decided on something fairly cartoony. With exaggerated proportions and smoothed edges where possible.

Programming

Programming is probably the hardest section to actually show work for. This will not stop me from trying however. The most 'showable' work from the programmers has to be the UI programming. We have a solid base for our main menu, options menu, load menu and pause screen.

In addition to this we had some work done on a modular script to cover the crystal puzzles mentioned above. This will also be used for a potential collectible in the game.

Finally we had some work done on testing base gun animations from one of our animators. a programmer took this into Unity to make some animation trees and confirm that they would work together.

Overall this has been a productive sprint, and i'm very happy with what myself and my excellent team have accomplished. 

Until next time,

The Deadeye Desperado Team