Game
Dead Drift

3 years ago

Changing the game's genre? Turning it into a car piloting roguelike shoot'em up? See the article for more info!

#indiedev #gamedev #pixelart #retro


When I started this project, my idea was to explore a combination of tower defense with moving towers. The moving towers were going to be multiple cars, circling a base and shooting at the incoming enemies.

As I develop this idea, I find that for it to work properly (if it will ever work at all) would take a good number of different vehicles, powers, enemies, and other game elements, which would probably take a long time to develop into an interesting strategy game.

At the same time, driving around trying to avoid an evergrowing crowd of hungry zombies, since it takes a basic skill, quickly becomes fun. Take a look at this second gif:

gameplay_11.gif

Following this, I will abandon the original idea of making a tower defense game, and make a car-based roguelike, a Mad Max meets Vampire Survivors sort of thing. These are the changes I did on the prototype you folks have been seeing until now:

  • The player drives the car around (instead of it following a pre-defined path);

  • Zombies swarm the player's car (instead of targeting the base);

  • Zombies punch the player's car, and the car takes damage (instead of the base).

These rules change and redesign the game's core loop to look like this beautiful thing:

new_core_loop.png

In this redesign, there's one game object that kinda loses its role. Can you guess which?

If you said "The base," you are right!

I'm thinking of using the base for two things:

  • If the player's car gets too far from the base, a countdown will start, killing the player when it reaches zero;

  • The player will need to carry supply boxes, which will appear on the map, back to the base. Maybe these boxes heal the car? Maybe they add new powers to the upgrade deck?

I'm still not sure what bonus these boxes could grant, but having collectibles that spawn randomly on the map is a good incentive for the player to roam the map and not stay only in one place.

Well, that's it for today! I'm pretty excited about this new direction, and I think you folks will like this better as well! I'm still not sure when I'll have a playable version of the game ready, but as soon as I have it, I'll upload it here!

See ya!



24 comments

Loading...

Next up

Mission Complete! Yesterday I was thinking hard about Dead Drift and I had a game design breakthrough!

If you're interested in this kind of design stuff, click on [Read article] below...

#indiedev #gamedev

Sharing the pixel art I did for a personal project I never got to make. The player would control an enchanted chest that had to investigate the disappearance of its wizard master!

What do you think? Would this had looked cool?

#pixelart

It's coming, folks!!! Anyone else excited???

Madeline is the main protagonist of the mountain climbing platformer, Celeste. The game has been praised for its visuals, gameplay, and introspective narrative. The game's creator Maddy Thorson confirmed that Madeline is trans in 2020.

A photo with Abacaxi, one of my dogs!

And, yes, we're both scraggly dudes.

Happy Video Game Day!

July 8 is Video Game Day, a holiday that's obviously close to our hearts at Game Jolt.

Celebrate by completing our quests! They won't be around long, so get the rewards while you can.

Posting some other DEAD DRIFT EXPERIMENT GIFS. You can see "enemy trucks" (the dark rectangle thingies roving around) AND big zombies (they have 10x the HP of a regular zombie!!)

Some additional comments in the article!

#pixelart #gamedev #indiedev

Everybody talking about the Super Mario movie and here I am thinking how cool it would be if they made a movie out of THIS game...

@ryon is a Jolter to Watch, game dev, programmer, and artist who worked on Five Nights at Friedrich's! Follow @ryon before the quest ends on July 15 and you'll get Coins!

NEW UI PLANNING!

Since the beginning of this project, I've done its UI in a somewhat haphazard way. Now it's time to get some things right, so I'm planning to fix some things about its user interface.

Read more in the article by clicking on...