I’ve been busy these past few months going back to the basics and working on a twin-stick shooter called WE ARE DOOMED. I debuted it at the Seattle Indies Expo (to some very positive feedback) over the first week of September. I did mention this was belated, didn’t I?
WE ARE DOOMED covers a well-worn genre, but it’s not exactly straight-forward or predictable.
Giving the player a massive, overpowered laser beam weapon was the catalyst for booting up Xcode and prototyping away. Even when it was just a doodle in a notebook I knew it would survive the development process, even as everything from the controls, to the look, to the enemy behaviours changed dramatically.
However, it quickly became apparent that an overpowered player was going to make the game too easy. So I threw lots of enemies on screen. I wanted to avoid making a “bullet hell” game, so most enemies don’t shoot at all and are quite weak. The challenge for the player is in the overwhelming number of enemies, and the general trickiness of their movement patterns. This means the play style is less hyper-accurate dodging, and more strategic and dynamic crowd control.
This became the fundamental hook for WE ARE DOOMED: the interplay between the player being overpowered and the enemies spawning at an overwhelming rate.
Apart from the mechanics, I was interested in exploring vector art styles. I love the glowy vector look as-made-famous by Geometry Wars, but there’s so much unexplored territory. I surveyed far and wide, and settled on rough, glitchy geometry with an emphasis on motion and colour.
I initially pegged the release date for October. Unfortunately, that turned out to be very optimistic. Early 2014 is looking more likely. I’ll make sure to post screenshots and videos along the way though!
For now, you can visit the WE ARE DOOMED website and follow me on Twitter.