RoboSamurai celebrates his first birthday today!
Like the title of the post suggests, exactly a year ago i started developing this on-going project.
The Beginning
Wednesday, 4th of November 2020 08:19:54 marks the date this project came to life, as then I created the game’s respective folder named “3dgame” in my main documents folder. By 3rd of December, I got my first concept art of the main character of the game done.
The first ever digitalized design of “Nix”. Very blocky, ironman-like design. The pre-design of this one didn’t have the color purple nor a jetpack, I still remember it like it was today when my friend showed me some old-school anime that had characters in robosuits with big butterfly-like jetpack. All I can say is that I fell in love with them.
The initial idea
The idea I had for RoboSamurai was very different from what is right now. Even before the start of the developing process, I always wanted to make a parkour Mirror’s Edge inspired game. I remember playing it as a very young kid, and the main thing that I found very annoying was how not smooth it was. All the movements in that game felt very limiting and undynamic of sorts. So I settled on an idea and started learning game dev.
That idea didn’t last long, because I saw a rise in popularity of making game-dev videos about parkouring and dynamic movement. People like Dani or Steven suddenly became very popular from basically the same type of games they made. So I thought to myself, “I need to make something less… generic”. And how genius of me that I started making a dynamic sword-fighting game, about a mechanic trying to rescue his girlfriend from an evil company.
No, but really. I really do think this kind of narrative is really good for making fast and engaging stories for big or small games made by indie developers. I actually made a very fast sum up of the story, which might be a lil on the outdated side, but it captures the idea I had back then.
Please open the original file with this link in order to see the image in full resolution
Progress
I know most game-dev stories go like this: Person has an idea for a game. They learn to make games. They start making the game but lose motivation, they stop etc. etc.
In fact, my game had an opposite impact on me. Back then, classes were still online, so I had a lot of time on breaks to develop the game. I would say the progress was and still is really good. There were times when I couldn’t do anything - I had many mental breakdowns over small things and stuff like that, but ultimately nothing was bad enough to make me quit. Unfortunately I’m very bad at managing progress logs (that’s why I’m thinking of making a YouTube channel, but that takes time which I’m constantly running out of) which resulted in me not really marking what times I progressed more than others. Tho I do have times for when I released public test versions for feedback: Version “0.02” (which was my first-ever combat test) released on 23rd of December 2020, another test version conveniently named “0.03” was released on January 3rd 2021 and the latest testing version that I named 0.1t (since it was a much bigger step up from the 0.0X versions) was released on 20th of June 2021.
I am proud of every single test version I released and the increasing quality of them shows that I indeed made progress (and looking back and comparing it to the current state I can assure you the progress is still going strong)
Current State
Now, 4 test version releases later, I am still in love with every single part of RoboSamurai. I haven’t released 90% of the things I do for the game, many of which being lore and many concept arts that I’m mostly not very proud of. So many ideas and so little time to make them real.
I think this post is a bit on the longer side. Honestly there aren’t many things that can be put in 2 sentences that won’t be uninformative or boring to read. So that’s why I’m going to give you a little sneak peek on what’s coming in the new test build of the game:
What’s next?
The main new thing for the test build (aside from all of the quality of life, bug, fixes, rebalances, code rewrites, new mechanics, and all) are new enemies. In the latest build, we met the dreadful Spider enemy. This time, the game will introduce two new enemy types: Wasps and Mantises. Obviously they don’t have proper names yet, and they don’t sound very robotic at all but let me show you some of the concept art AND game screenshots of the new enemies.
Drawn by my dear friend Duck
(This is a Blender Render and isn’t what the wasp looks like in the actual game)
“Trust me gentlemen, this is not what it looks like”
“This time drawn by me. MES stands for “Military Extension Services”
Again, not an in-game screenshot, but a cool render I made
Cool neons
Kinda low quality, but here are both of the enemies’ side by side.
Wow, you made it this far! Seriously, congratulations on holding up for so long. Last thing I want to do is thank everyone I ever met that helped me somehow. Whether it was for the lore, people who play tested the game, anyone. Thank you, truly. If you are here to learn about another test build’s release date: 2021. That’s all I can say at the moment.
Again, thank you for reading, and I hope you will stick around for more. See you in the capitalist dystopia I’m creating,
Meta out.