Devlog 1

Welcome to our first Dev Log for Project Clockwork! 

The game we are developing stems from the idea of “What if the weapon & upgrade mechanics from vampire survivors was put into a 3d FPS?” We want the focus of the game being stuck in small arenas with a great number of enemies. Relying on the fast passed movement and the auto weapons to deal with each room. As well as more platforming focused rooms as a breather from the combat. There are a lot of unanswered questions we have about the game, and we plan to see how the game develops, to answer them.

About The Team

We are 2 brothers, Liam and James.
James works on Programming, sprites, Shaders, and VFX.
Liam mainly works on the Programming, and level design.
Jared is our honorary member of the team, he works on all the music and sound effects.

Progress So Far

Feasibility and Fun Factor

Our focus was to quickly prototype the core concepts to test their feasibility and, to determine if the game is fun to play. And to see if we even wanted to develop the game.

At the end of this development cycle, we held some play-tests which were mainly aimed at testing the automatic weapons and wave system. We found that people did enjoy the base mechanics and movement, as well as the art style. The game play we had showed some promise, and we enjoyed working on this game so we decided to continue development.

Upgrade System Challenges

One of the main hurdles we've faced is designing a well-made upgrade system. We want to create a system that’s easy to work in with the back-end  whilst making it easy to make unique upgrades for each weapon. It’s easy to develop a simple system if each weapon used generic upgrades. i.e.: just Damage, fire rate, range. ETC. but we wanted to be able to have each weapon have its own unique set of upgrades.

 This is something we are still actively trying to figure out.

Level

We had an initial level developed, with 3 separate arenas joined by simple platforming. But for this build, we decided to make a small arena where enemies would infinitely spawn. To focus this play-test just on the combat and movement aspects. 

Looking Ahead

Moving beyond our test arena, our next big milestone is to develop a simple map to represent the full game loop, as we still need to test out how to design the levels. Since we don’t really know what would be fun yet. 

We plan to add additional weapons such as a missile launcher, minigun, flamethrower and more.

We're also planning to overhaul our upgrade system to make it more fun and interesting. We want upgrades to not just be stat changes for each weapon, but instead have unique effects for each weapon and incorporate an element system (physical, explosives, fire and electricity).