MILESTONE 1 - Work in progress! (Minigun is Minifun)
DarkSwarm Devlog time!
Things are going great here! Milestone 1 is well under way! We are 3 weeks now into MS1 until the deadline in June.
First of all SOOO much has been happening it has been hard to keep up with the more frequent devlog posts. While Jonas and Ox has also been VERY busy going to and talking to a lot of potential new candidate interns from The Games Assembly in Malmö. These guys will bring so much coolness to the project. It will be absolutely amazing!
The goal of Milestone 1 is to create a good definition of the core gameplay in local co-op. Stuff like a first pass on weapons, classes, abilities, camera, controls, character controller, a smaller selection of enemies and a single mission type (extraction) playable in a procedurally generated level.
So we can play and feel how all the intended mechanics interact in a fully playable and tweakable setting.
The game will also scale visually so it will look sweet in 4K on high-end PC hardware depending on graphical settings.
Also we are usually Friday testing on Steam Deck on ‘medium’ settings. Runs around 60fps depending. It even runs fine at around 50-60 fps on an older integrated chipset laptop on low settings. Looking pretty good even for what it is.
A lot of time has been spent on janking out and refurbishing my old prototype and optimizing what was there. Creating structure ‘real’ programmers like, fixing bugs and developing all the unseen systems of the game so we can play and iterate as fast as possible on the project. All going super great!
We also did a bit of work on trying out split screen as dynamic switching and a single camera zooming out and framing the action. It was clear that for dynamic split screen switching we need to implement a more custom solution if we want to go down that route. Split screen and camera things is on the radar.
Split screen does indeed cost a bit of performance. But it’s not that bad really . We might make various options regarding. Let’s see where it lands! No promises as always. ;)
The latest development has seen all 4 classes in the game. With various class weapons and skills. Still >super early< but it lends a lot to the game already.
There was also some VERY early work on a minigun.. It just feels very dear to our hearts! We are in absolute love with the power of the minigun. <3
I did some work on the environment shader. There will be blood!.. like everywhere if we want that. Also includes alien goo and other things.
Also great work on visuals and audio and procedural levels. We will try to make the levels look as hand crafted as possible.
Lore wise it has been pretty still as we are very busy with actual gameplay and lore is actually not part of the Milestone. But at least we now have a rough and broad idea about the universe and how it operates and its relation to the players.
And as mentioned last week we (Jonas & Ox) also went to Malmö in Sweden to talk to a lot of SUPER talented students from The Game Assembly. It was INTENSE! We managed to talk to 40 students during the day. So hope we will land some more great talent at the studio to work on the game. We were certainly impressed by the level of quality they have produced. We are REALLY looking forward to working with some of those guys. <3
Yay! We have matching Bitfire Games hoodies going to Sweden and other biz events.
Epic Games representatives will dropped by our studio last week! How awesome is that! As part of this local Copenhagen MatchUp event. They mostly talked about us getting on the Unreal Developer Network. And always nice to have a chat.
We had a few biz talks planned at the Matchup venue and online. But it is not a large focus right now, as we already have our base covered with Ghost Ship Games. It’s just for meeting new people and hanging out. Great fun!
All in all.. It has been some suuuper great and productive weeks! Much awesome things in the pipe. So far it looks like we are in good shape to reach MS1 in June! And hopefully with flying colors! Guess we will see! :)
Cheers from
Jonas and Bitfire Games
