Hello Guardians!
Today's a special day, it marks the first anniversary of the 1.0 release. But it is also more or less the eighth year we've been working on it and the fourth year since its first Early Access public release.
To celebrate, we thought we'd take a trip down memory lane and take you with us (or at least those interested in it).
In this post, we'll be showcasing some (very) old footage alongside visuals you've probably never seen before. It will highlight the different phases the project went through. And that later became the game you're playing now.
The Beginning?
"Eight years?!" You might think it's too long for a game this size. And you'd probably be right. But truth be told, when we started, most of us had just graduated out of school. We thought we were ready to make games (we clearly didn't expect that kind of journey).
So we just started…
We worked on a prototype, both visually and gameplay-wise. And we ended up with something quite different from where we are now.
Gunpawns had a really different shape and tone back in those days.
And it ended up looking like this:
Watch on YouTube
You can already notice the will to make some kind of "forward-combat FPS", you can also notice how the game was called "Robot Quest".
Needless to say, we were happy but… We learned so much along the way of doing this that we thought we could do much better if we tried again.
So we "rebooted" the project and the prototype.
Reshaping the Tone
Aside from cleaning up the mess the prototype was in terms of code, we wanted to go way further in terms of player movement and we also fiddled around with a more colorful tone for the game.
So we restarted a prototype, find some visuals from that period below.
You might recognize a weapon which is still here to this day.
We clearly had amazing UI design skills as well.
Below is the map we created to try out the new style of movement we wanted for the game. One where we'd be able to move faster, jump higher and even double-jump! At that time, we didn't have any other movement capabilities.
We called that map "Lunapark".
We spent countless hours just running, jumping and traversing it. Tweaking every single movement value.
One little trick we decided to implement was to modify the player's acceleration after landing. When simply moving, the player's character acceleration was really high, and it tampered with the ability to stop precisely when landing on platforms. So we added something that slows down your acceleration for a little while after landing. This is a trick that is still in the game today and (hopefully) provides a better platforming experience overall.
The 'Dark' Days
Once again, we learned a lot during the new prototype. And once again, we wanted more. So we rebooted everything, again. But this time, we leaned towards a more serious approach in our visual concepts. You can see what it looks like below.
One positive thing about this reboot though is that we were finally joined by real programmers. That meant no longer needing to reboot the code because we ended up with some spaghetti-thing that was impossible to expand upon.
Dark Canyon
Old Concepts of the Moon
Advanced Key Art of the Moon
Concept Arts for Fields
Concept Arts for Story/Cinematics
But after fidgeting for quite a while with that direction, we realized we weren't really happy with it.
Let's turn on the Light!
That wasn't what we were looking for. We've always wanted a game that feels good to be in in terms of mood.
So we tried something more "colorful". But we were still quite far away from the final "cartoon-comic" style you can find in the game right now. Find some concepts arts below.
Zen Gardens
Residential Districts
Promenade
Chill Zone
Futuristic Apartments
And we were also becoming """"better"""" at handling Unreal Engine and its lighting capabilities.
Fields
Suburbs
Haven-City
Canyon
We also turned our eyes to investors and people who were willing to support us financially speaking in general.
So we had to make a trailer for that…
Watch on YouTube
Comic-style Turn-around
While we were quite happy with the overall tone of the colors and the game being more "vivid", we still felt like we were missing something. So wanted to go more all-in in the comic-book approach.
Here's what it started to look like in our concepts / paintovers at the time.
But it didn't look quite as good in-game yet...
Or didn't it?
Meanwhile, we were also leveling up in marketing and business development.
The Early Access
After continuous tuning, we finally managed to find our artistic seed: the comic-style we were striving for.
And fortunately for us, because we were running out of time. We needed to actually make the game now and not just fiddle with graphics and gameplay.
So we released it in Early Access in 2020.
Some of you might remember, you joined us around that time!
We even made a little something to thank the first 200 of you who joined our Discord. We still can't believe we actually recently reached 15.000 members!
Watch on YouTube
And we also had the chance to attend Gamescom one year later!
Also, a little something our main (and only) animator did in his free-time… Probably the first time we could enjoy the presence of Buddybot in our studio.
Final Form
Three years later, in November 2023, Roboquest finally reached "its final form".
Our concept artist worked hard for the Steam Key Art.
And of course, the game evolved quite a bit...
Conclusion
Well, this was quite a long post, mostly because of all the visuals we shared.
We hope you liked this trip down memory lane, we sure did here at the studio. We laughed tracking back those visuals and remembering the fun (and challenging) times connected to them.
As for the future, the Endless Update is coming end of November. Like we said earlier, we will be sharing information about it over the course of the month. We will also share devleaks on Discord (we will sum them up in our posts here on Steam when able).
Stay tuned Guardians, have a great robot-smashing times!
And most importantly, thanks to everyone tagging along to that amazing journey.