After a whole year of not finishing it, I have finally released the trailer for the level editor, which is now know as: Worldbuilder. You can watch it here: [previewyoutube=II6L_wfn05g;full][/previewyoutube] And of course, you can join the official discord server, linked here, to engage with the community and get much more regular progress updates, and to watch my mental state plummet as I look at code I wrote 2 years ago.

Introductions

This is my first time doing one of these, so I should probably introduce myself. My name is Dan, and I am the sole developer working on Ruptured. I started Ruptured in May 2020 as my final project for a high school course, and I just kept working on it. I eventually started coming up with a story, which is why I am still making it to this day. The game is inspired by a Halo 5 map, which had the same core mechanic built entirely within forge, which I thought was cool. I now know that making the same world twice is twice the work, which is why I made the Worldbuilder to do most of that work for me. On that note, here's some development insight!

Development Update

I have started work on a massive refactor of the player code. Originally I had put everything in a single file with over 1800 lines of code. This made it impossible to find things, and was very prone to bugs. So, I decided to rewrite it almost from the ground up. I separated the general, movement, ability, and animation logic into different scripts, all referenced from the main one. This is much more extensible, which brings me to the next thing...

The Combat Update

Feedback from testers so far, and from my own experience, shows a huge problem with the game: The combat is not fun. Currently, you just aim at an enemy and spam click until it dies. And sometimes waiting for your energy to recharge. This is not engaging gameplay, and so I have come up with a plan to fix this:

Energy and Health

Health will be much more limited, with a maximum of 10 throughout the game. Getting hit will deal one damage, or two if it is a powerful hit. This simplifies the player's health, so they can focus more on the combat itself. Next, energy will no longer recharge on its own, or if it does it will be painfully slow. Instead, you can recharge using the rupture core. This limits your movement, but can recharge your energy to full relatively quickly. You can then use it to shoot, recover some health, and finally...

Rupture Attacks

You can't have magic in a sci-fi universe. Unless you call it a rift in space. Players will be able to expend a large amount of energy to unleash powerful AoE attacks. These will use a full un-upgraded energy meter, encouraging players to use them sparingly.

New Enemies

The current crop of enemies serve their purposes, but they are not very interesting. We have stationary ones that shoot at you, ones that pursue you and shoot at you, ones that push you, ones that walk back and forth... You get the idea. Very generic. And most importantly, they don't rupture. I have this cool mechanic that enemies can utilize, but they don't. I want to add enemies with more advanced AI, movement, and that can actually engage with the player instead of letting them simply walk past in the opposite dimension. I also want to add some trap ones, just as a little prank. The core combat will not change. You will still aim and shoot at enemies, and the movement will stay the same.

Future Plans

After the combat overhaul, my next focus will be NPCs. This will include a dialogue system, interactions, some form of quests, and shops. Beyond that, I plan to work on cutscenes, putting storyboards in-game as a placeholder as I build the necessary systems. Throughout this, I will be expanding and refining the world, fixing bugs, and adding content to the level editor. Ideally, I want the game to be in a state ready for February or June NextFest of next year, which of course comes with a playable demo. If you have read this far, thank you for the support! Don't forget to join the Discord server and wishlist the game here on Steam! I might start doing these monthly, if this does well.