Development Blog - Life update, level progress

[Practice drawing of Dawn]

This will be a short blog post, apologies for that! We've been hard at work on a lot of things, but most of it is not quite ready to be shown off yet. But I do want to provide some updates on a couple of things!

I know I say this all the time, but remember that GIFS do not load on the mobile app.

Life update

Let's start with the big one then, at least for me! In the past there were multiple things preventing me from working full time on Selaco. University played a huge part in that. I kept having to balance things out and it wasn't quite working out for me. My efforts towards college have been an all-time low because my passion is simply not there anymore. Selaco is something I am very passionate about, it's a project I fully believe in, something I want to actually realize. I have made the decision to put my college on-hold and drop out for the time being, allowing me to work fulltime on this dream project of mine; Selaco.

For you, as a backer and (hopefully) fan of Selaco, this means that the game will take a good jump in quality and gameplay length as I no longer have too many distractions preventing me from working on this. There have been plenty of occasions where I could not do something awesome for the game due to a lack of time. I often found myself going back to level design while completely abandoning an awesome gameplay idea that I’ve had. This also means I can spend some additional time to get my sanity back. The last couple of months have been rough because I was juggling around too many things at once. It became unhealthy and became a constant source of headaches as I have explained in an older blog post. Hopefully these days are behind me now. Let's turn Selaco into the best game we can possibly make, together with you guys!

Level Progress

Here is a fun little progress picture! This is the difference between a block-out and a detail pass.

We have been hard at work with level 3 which is not a level we want to talk about for the time being. It's a mysterious one, one that switches things up a bit as Selaco is not going to be a non-stop action shooter against the same bad guys all the time - no matter how good the combat loop is, eventually you want to switch things up for just a little while to make it fresh again. Same applies to environmental art, we still try to give every level it’s own visual style, along with a completely unique texture set. That door you once saw in the first level will most likely never be used again in a later level. It keeps things fresh! Finishing a level should always feel like a breath of fresh air.

Grenade Launcher

Model is in the works! Last week I showed the concept art, today I can show you the 3D model. Keep in mind that textures have not yet been applied!

Context-Sensitive Interaction Popups

The name is a work in progress. But we’ve changed how GZDoom detects interactable objects and allows it to display information next to the crosshair, kind of like an im-sim game. If you, for example, approach a keyboard, a prompt will pop up to explain what will happen if you interact with it. See the GIF below for a short demonstration!

Conclusion

I know it’s a short one, sorry about that! Patreon is a great platform but once you start working on areas you don't want to spoil it becomes a little hard to talk about things and make lengthy blog posts. I don't want to be annoyingly vague, I don't want to spoil the entire game before we get to release, so I think it’s best to just keep the blog post a little shorter than usual. If you have a fun idea that you want us to talk about in the next blog post, let me know! I am not much of a writer so coming up with things is hard for me. I’d love to dive deep into certain mechanics but I need to know what people would like to read first!

For now, Believe me that we are all working on some awesome stuff! I’m sure you’ll see why when you get to play Selaco in the future! Hopefully we are done soon so we can get back to making stuff we can share with you guys.

As usual, I cannot thank all of you enough for sticking around on Patreon. We are in a very fortunate position because of all of you and we hope that once we release the game, you look at it with pride. You allowed us to make this game, you allowed us to make this awesome. And, hopefully, you also made it possible for us to create something memorable!

See you all soon!

(P.S: Tier 2 patrons, remember that we have a Showcase channel on our Discord Server! We use it to show tons of behind the scenes stuff.)