From the idea, through prototypes, all the way to a playable demo!
Let’s see how far we are after 4 months.
A little bit of history: Artillery Royale started in January, I mean, it’s been in my head for a long time but I started to write down some stuff in January 2020 and I decided in May to give it a go by working on it full time.
Also, because I know projects work better with a scope, I arbitrarily decided to fix a deadline for the first playable demo to September 2020.
May 2020
In may I was playing with Unity own Physics engine and thought it would be easy. I also used an asset that allows getting destructible sprite very easily but, rests assured, all this will be soon discarded.
I also had a first prototype of map generator based on bitmap at the time. See details here.
June 2020
If I remember well, in June I had my first game over the Internet with a friend. It was laggy as hell and I did not see how it could improve with my technical choices at the time. So I discarded all the networking part too.
I still was trying to get Unity Physics engine work the way I wanted, and it was quite convincing. I built a specifics scene to test all the parameters and stuff.
This is when I decided to implement the distance limit, here with a halo that prevents you to move more than a specific distance. After testing it for a while, I’m pretty sure it won’t end up in the game in that form.
I also iterated on the map generator, positioning destructible objects and ammo/health bonus boxes.
July 2020
What an exciting month! In parallel to coding the game, I was also looking for a designer to help me work on the game. I found someone that has the exact style I wanted and he accepted to work for me.
We can see in those videos some of his concept art. Except that I started to tackle the hard problem: implementing my own Physics engine.
August 2020
With Jean-Baptiste, we settle down on Anima2D for the character animation and it’s pretty cool because I had some time to test some sort of ragdoll animations — something I always wanted to have — on this video, it looks stupid and full of bug but the final implementation will be great. I also worked on my own Character movement controller.
In the last video, we can see that I started to integrate the final art from Jean-Baptiste. The map generator has to be tweaked a bit more too.
To be honest with me I’m not even halfway to have something ready but I hope that in September I’ll get some sort of demo.
Fingers crossed