Hey there,
To celebrate the start of this year 7DFPS, we put together a little surprise for you : )
While digging into some old and dusty hard drives, we found ancient builds of Deadlock, the original prototype of DeadCore made during the 2012 7DFPS!
Playing these builds, taking a look at old screenshots of different stages of development and old pictures of (way) younger versions of ourselves really brought back many fond memories of the numerous steps we took during this journey! And what a journey! It all started after we graduated from a master in video games where we all met: some of us were starting to work in the industry and were longing for an opportunity to make games together again.
The opportunity came up when the first 7DFPS was announced back in summer 2012: the goal was to make a first person game within 7 days and due to the limited time and other constraints the idea of a FPS-Platformer without any damage/combat system quickly came to our minds and we rushed during a week to make something we found really cool back in the days (well, it does feel a bit rough today…).
We kept pushing the prototype further, polishing it for months, adding more features and content until we reached a point where we thought we would actually have a (small) game in our hands that we could sell and would at the very least serve as a portfolio to land a job in the industry.
We did a small crowdfunding campaign to pay for a few Unity licenses and started showcasing our prototype during events and festivals, getting feedback from players and iterating on the level design to make it more accessible (and sometimes doubling the size of some platforms as initially it was insanely difficult!).
This has been a bumpy ride and yet full of many precious moments we will always remember like when we were invited by Unity to their booth at the 2014 GDC (watching the game’s trailer being displayed on a disco ball later on in a night club in San Francisco was really something ^^’).
Back to the initial topic, we’ve created a page on Itch.io:
https://5bitsgames.itch.io/deadlock-7dfps
There you’ll find:
The original Deadlock 7DFPS prototype (~1 week of work)
DeadCore alpha build (~1 year of work)
Be aware that these old builds come in the state they were more than 10 years ago and might be a bit buggy…
Anyway, we hope you will have fun digging these old builds that truly are testimonies of how DeadCore evolved through all these years and don’t hesitate to share your times/thoughts on them, it’s always cool for us to hear from you : )
And wishlist the remaster on Steam !!
Cheers!