A Decade of Sublevel Zero

10 whole years ago today, we released Sublevel Zero on PC. To celebrate, we\'ve put together some stuff we think you\'re gonna like!

Retrospective E-Book

First off - we\'ve put together a PDF looking back at the game and its development. It\'s the result of poring through our archives, hunting down things we thought might be lost and reflecting on what we\'ve found.

The Retrospective is full of concepts, developer interviews, tales from the trenches and more, including lots of never-before-seen stuff. It\'s even got a link to the original prototype builds we made for the Ludum Dare game jam!

Retrospective PDF

90% Discount

For one week you - or the friend you\'ve been trying to convince to try 6DoFs - can get the game for 90% off!

Development Footage

We\'ve fished out some old private gameplay videos and made them public. These were used for things like events and expos, previously only seen by people who were at them. Now anyone can get a look back in time at what Sublevel Zero looked like while we were making it.

[dynamiclink href=\"https://youtu.be/kaS1x4QBmgA\"][/dynamiclink]

[dynamiclink href=\"https://youtu.be/f56_qMi0A6o\"][/dynamiclink]

Pre-Launch Builds

But... we can go one better than that. Thanks to the magic of Steam, if you really want to see how much the game changed during development, you can now play three internal builds from January, May and August 2015.

To play these builds on Steam, right-click on the game from the library page and select \"Properties\", then the \"Betas\" tab. Drop down \"Beta Participation\" to find the three \"retrospective\" branches.

From our testing, none of these builds interfere with your save data. But, if you\'re unsure, you can pause cloud saves and/or backup your save files (the PlayerData folder in the Sublevel Zero game folder).

retrospective_jan2015

Press Esc to open the dev menu. This allows equipping a few weapons, respawning all the enemies and most importantly flipping Y. There\'s no procedural generation - this was all the \"content\" we had!

[img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/8000399/4b974d15cbf9bd1e02e9226ab426f1b10b0393b9.gif\"][/img]

retrospective_may2015

This is a build we showed at a few events. The procedural generation was partly working but not fully, so we opted to hard-code this one. The map also wasn\'t fully working so that\'s not there either. But it does have Oculus DK2 support if you\'ve still got one of those about!

[img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/8000399/2b0fd1debd7f5da9cff3795cc4682e463b2249a2.gif\"][/img]

retrospective_pax2015

This is the build we showed at Pax Prime 2015 as part of the Indie Megabooth. This was just over a month before launch, so it\'s pretty complete, but there are lots of small differences. Feedback from this expo was critical to polishing the game for launch.

Oh and one last thing

...maybe a sequel?

ok so here\'s the thing. We\'ve been tinkering with something. It\'s super early but we\'re having fun with it. Imagine Sublevel Zero but with shorter runs, upgrades that come thick and fast and - most importantly - [strike]dozens[/strike] [strike]hundreds[/strike] THOUSANDS of enemies on-screen.

[img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/8000399/ae1e1e8c33babbd1f30ba6c50b53bbc5da846ce3.gif\"][/img]

It\'s a 6DoF roguelite with survivorlike elements and we think it\'s really promising. But. As we all know, 6DoFs are unfortunately niche. We\'re not sure what funding model we might be looking for yet, whether it be crowd funding or publisher or something else, but it might be a bit of a long shot regardless.

If this sounds like something you\'re interested in, please show your support in the comments - it could really help us make this happen. Cards on the table - we just do not know if this game will get made, but we at least want to hear what you think!

If you\'d rather not comment publicly, or you want to tell us more, you can also put your thoughts in this form.

Sublevel Zero Sequel Form

Thank you!

If you\'ve read this far, if you\'ve played Sublevel Zero, if you\'ve enjoyed our work in any way - thank you so much. It\'s crazy that it\'s been 10 years, and we\'re so happy to have had all of you along for the ride. Cheers.

p.s. in case you heard about that Unity security bug a few days ago, don\'t worry - Sublevel Zero isn\'t affected because it\'s too old!