Hey!

It's been a while since I last posted about Dead Drift. The last time I did, I was talking about its new UI and stuff.

I have been swamped with work/life stuff (which can become cool news in the future, depending on how things go, but I can't talk too much about it now!).

However, this is not the only reason I haven't progressed in the last week or so.

The reason is: I've reached a "design crossroads" in the project. Let me explain what I mean by this.

A Design Crossroads

When I began working on this project, I considered making it a tower defense variation with moving towers (aka the cars).

At some point, I realized actually driving the car was really fun, and easy to do in Construct. So I decided to pivot the project to a more roguelike, "Vampire Survivors" style game.

Since then, I've been developing different powers to test how this game would work. I have an initial "set" of 14 powers (some of them not fully working but enough for me to get an idea).

Testing this version of the game, I began to question my concept, though.

Playing and testing these powers, I got the feeling that to have a fully functioning "survivors" style game, I'd likely need tons of powers and other stats and skills and stuff. And that's even taking into account the power-up upgrades because they're just "stronger" versions of the same power-up.

I'm still not sure I'll be able to develop tons and tons of powers... and, at the same time, I want to release a game that's fun and challenging!

So... what have I been doing then?

Experimenting with the Formula

I'm basically figuring out how to proceed in a way that doesn't take me a long, long time to finish this project.

My initial attempt was to add more skill to the game, by making it more like a racing game. I think there's something in there, but I was afraid to share any gifs of it before I could write this post, so as not to scare you folks (like "OMFG, this yhsper dude is making an entirely new game, what's wrong with him???")

Here's a gif of this experiment:

(There would also be obstacles and other cars and stuff, but I didn't get far enough in the experiment.)

I've been doing a lot of tests and experiments like this one.

The gif at the top of the post, where the camera zooms out as the car drives away from the base, it's another one of those tests. I'm trying to make dodging the zombies more interesting, by seeing the "maze" their bodies create.

I've also considered making the car shoot from its front side (and not auto-aiming at the nearest zombies) or maybe making the car's turret be mouse controlled, both to increase the game's skill ceiling, thus not needing to have so many power-up choices. However, I'm still not entirely satisfied.

So...

What Choices Do I Have?

Right now, I see two paths in front of me:

• I double down on the original survivors approach, and try to make the game more option rich, OR;

• I add more skill elements to Dead Drift, making it more like a regular arcade racing/shooting game with roguelike elements.

I'm still not sure which is the best way to go (and I'd love to hear your comments if you have them!), but I'm trying to figure this all out, and that's one of the reasons why the game has slowed down, development-wise!

Ok! That's it for this devlog! As usual, I'd love to hear what you think! :) Cheers, folks!