• ProjectsWIP

  • Project UCG - An action packed twin stick shooter with RPG elements.

Hi Godot community!

Little over a year ago I started this project. I had a vision for a game that I wanted to create. After a lot of game design writing and sketching it was time to choose an engine to start prototyping. Obviously I landed on Godot 🙂. Such a delight to develop with the engine. I showed my friend what I had in mind and we both got hooked on the idea so we teamed up.

A little bit about the game.

It's a top down twin stick shooter with some RPG inspired elements. The RPG elements will come in as unlocking and upgrading weapons. The objective in the game is simple... Battle your way through multiple arenas and aim to get the highest score possible. As you progress the game will get harder and harder.

I thought that after a year now that I'm getting a lot of the basic mechanics in place, maybe it's a good time to start sharing some progress. Current focus is gameplay mechanics and trying to nail the fun factor. There is visual development happening, but is in very early stages at the time and not ready for showing just yet.

Some inspiration comes from games such as Smash TV, Geometry wars, Nex Machina. But the combat will be much closer to what you experience in Doom Eternal. You won't be able to mindlessly shoot your way to success, but need to be a lot more tactical, combine/switch between different weapons for different scenarios, master evade/dashing etc.

The key for me is to keep the scope small and focus on quality over quantity together with the fun factor. Even though it's too early to talk about it in general, I hope to release (when ready) on Steam, and a dream would also be to release it on the Nintendo Switch.

Here's the latest Progress, #15

(for description, scroll down to latest post)

Here's the latest Devlog, 01 - Origins

(for description, scroll down to latest post)

Latest Game Artlog - Early concept exploration

(for description, scroll down to post)

The first videos recorded on the project:

This is a passion project so progress pacing will vary. I hope to show more current state soon.

Hey and welcome to the forum, @MikeCL .

I never heard of Nex Machina, but that game looks cool so I bought it. I also had a lot of fun with RUINER, looks kind of similar. Not to mention Crimsonland, one of the best games of all time. https://store.steampowered.com/app/262830/Crimsonland/

Anyhow, I wish you luck in finishing your game.

@cybereality said: Hey and welcome to the forum, @MikeCL .

I never heard of Nex Machina, but that game looks cool so I bought it. I also had a lot of fun with RUINER, looks kind of similar. Not to mention Crimsonland, one of the best games of all time. https://store.steampowered.com/app/262830/Crimsonland/

Anyhow, I wish you luck in finishing your game.

Hey, thanks! Yeah, Nex Machina is great.. A bit too much chaos with the bullet hell visuals, but it plays very well and it looks fantastic.

Ruiner is also a game I was looking closely at. I love the visuals but had a hard time getting used to the controllers. But yeah, love the vibes.

So this is closer to how the project looks like currently.

Prototyping and testing out the new spawn system I created with the first enemy class/type. Only showing 1 enemy here, but it can handle multiple enemy class spawning and it also give me great control over each wave. Designed to go through different spawn levels with each level having several spawn waves (5 waves in this video).

Everything you see is still placeholder graphics for now.

Cool, yeah, it's starting to look like a game!

Trying out the new flamethrower weapon mechanics together with weapon switching .

The flamethrower sets the enemy on fire and the enemy will take repeat damage lasting 10 seconds. While enemy is burning, bullets deal an additional 20 damage points. Making the flamethrower a deadly combo weapon.

If you happen to like the progress. feel free to like the video, it helps with getting the project and engine awareness :)

Ending the week with a small update. We felt we needed a better "Working title" name for the project. So we changed the project name to Phantom Fury.

Enemies now have their own health bar as well as damage, score indicators that pop up.

An important aspect of the game that gives the player a clearer opportunity to see what each weapon has for effect on different enemies. Also makes it easier to see the score being collected on each kill.

The white smaller numbers are damage dealt on enemy, blue number represents the kill score and the yellow weapon points. Weapon points is what you will use to upgrade and unlock new weapons.

There are some smaller bugs needed to be fixed (like the weapon score collected doesn't match with the accumulated score shown).. Something that will probably be fixed for next update.

Another update. This time focusing on the player health. Added life bar that also changes color to animated red when health is critical. Player also flashes now (like the enemy) when taking damage. Keeping track of player health will be important to reach those high scores.

Introducing new enemy class. This spider robot is a type of hound class. Meaning that it does only do damage by melee attacks. It's not very smart. It tracks down and rushes straight towards the player. But it's tough, slightly faster than the player and deals a great damage if they get too close.

Here's an early concept made by my partner. It's on a separate channel that will be focused more on art specific updates. An early concept exploring ideas. What you see in the game currently is a modified version of this design.

We tried that design first. But was a bit hard to get this design to be agile and flexible enough for the gameplay. So we experimented a bit by giving it a torso etc to make it more dynamic.

4 days later

Hope you all are having a great week!

Here's another concept sculpt from my partner. This is one of the first tests he made for the project. If you haven't seen it already by browsing the channel, here it is.

5 months later

Hi all! It's been a while. Work have been brutal and we moved in to a new house so haven't had the time to go public with any updates.

Introducing multiple arenas. A lot have happened since last update. Me and Mr. Artman realised we needed to expand the game a bit and we decided that the game should have multiple arenas to battle in and also an end. This to create some more variety to both the gameplay but also visuals. This also gives us a bigger canvas to experiment with. Drawing some inspiration from the old Smash T.V we also want the gameplay to be coninous with minimal loading time (if any at all).

So I prototyped a new arena system that seem to work quite well with the spawn system for each arena. Still needs tons of refinements but it's a start.

Hopefully I'll have time to post updates on the project more often now.

7 days later

This update focuses on combat. Weapons now overheats, dashing and close combat now also play a bigger role in gameplay. Not balanced in any way. Just getting the mechanics in. It's designed so players need to be a bit agile and more tactical in how they choose to fight.

When the player stops shooting, after 3 seconds the cooldown process starts. But if you reach 100% heat then you overheat the weapon and you have to wait 10 seconds before cooldown starts.

The turret placeholder mockup also got a small visual update. Felt it needed to be a bit more clear between the different states (hunting the player vs planted and shooting the player)

6 days later

Introducing Rocket Launcher. Fun one to prototype. Still needs tons of balancing and the target indicator also needs more work. But it's a start.

3 months later

Devlog 01 - Origins

First proper devlog for the project. I talk a bit about what inspired the game and what we want to achieve with it. We are getting closer to having an MVP version of the game prototyped and figured it would be good timing to share a bit more about our progress and thoughts.

13 days later

Progress #11 - mixed update.

We are getting close to having a MVP version of the prototype. We can basically play the game from start to finish now. It's by no means balanced and we still have mechanics to implement, bugs to fix etc... But we can start the game, battle through arenas and in the end, beat the game. And with that we have been talking a lot about the art direction for the game and have started the art process.

Hopefully we can start talking more about some solid art after the summer some time. And by then probably start replacing the placeholders with real assets and start making the game pretty.