Landless is the working title for my game. I initially wanted a dystopian future pirate game with survival/crafting base and a physics based gameplay with a simplistic but neon voxel art style. After working on the prototype, the pirate experience I wanted couldn't fit within the scope of a solo project. Maybe in the future I could flesh out a pirate version but, for now, I'm ditching the idea and sticking with pretty much the rest of the original plan.

This game is going to be a single player, top-down perspective, freecam, experience. As of now, you can play the prototype. This version will not be revised because I'm building the final project back from the ground up (except art assets but I will also be adding more). The gameplay will be nearly identical to the current prototype only with a more organized codebase meant for commercial release and, of course. many more mechanics and a full release worth of content and objectives. The new build of the game is in pre-alpha stage so this is the official first devlog for this project with many more to come.

With the project in such an early stage, many of the plans I have or will discus are subject to change or be replaced or removed entirely. With that said, here's the vision for the game. The idea is survival mechanics in a crowded world where your action have consequences and ripple effects. 

Gameplay length could go in two possible directions. One way could lead to a more persistent experience where you save and pickup another time and ultimately spend tens to hundreds of hours on a single world. Another direction would be more of a rouge/permadeath system. One where you cant expect the world or "run" to last longer than a single sit down of the game. I'm leaning more to the ladder for a few reasons. One, I never really see fleshed out survival games where I can jump in for a few hours and start fresh the next day. Two, Sometimes the skill of a game comes from knowing how the progression works and iterating on making that progression go faster. Either way, I plan to implement progression beyond any single run in some form. Three, it could open up to more interesting time management. What I mean is , playing a survival game, you could stand in the same place for two hours real time and just pickup where you left off. Even with day/night cycles, its like everything in the world is waiting for your input. I like to imagine a situation where you do the wrong thing and miss a critical window of opportunity for items, faster progression, whatever. I'm not saying hard scripting of events, more like the timer starts on certain interactions when you start the run. I will be fleshing this idea out more but you could expect the philosophy for building mechanics to reflect these ideas.

Physics of the game comes from how I think moving board game pieces in real life would be. I want them to be realistic physically in that way, roughly. Not so much how, say, a human body would actually move. I'm trying to simulate the board game feeling only in some ways. I guess in the way that insures you that you are controlling game pieces. Not much else to say on that, pretty much no more complex than what the prototype is.

Art style is, simple. I want to do my best to make it clear what's going on. A dilapidated world made with comic book colors with voxel art for the 3D assets and plain pixel art for the 2D. Not doing much on the animation side. I can tell you, the prototype has zero animations and it looks like what I want to game to be. I know I don't want pre-made art assets so the voxel style is the best compromise I could muster. 

The last thing I will talk about is design. The skill/luck ratio will be tightly measured. For me, I like games that have their own "special sauce". Without stepping too much into the world of promises I can't keep, I will say that all of my design choices are made with that "special sauce" in mind. The goal is to create an experience that mirrors the fun and openness of a board game and survival/crafting games wrapped into a package that can be consumed in one sitting. I believe a game should be as simple or as complex as the player if the freedom to set goals can be constructed from the core game elements. None of this can answer what I believe most people would like to know. I realize I need to explain more about what the objectives of this title will be. I just haven't implemented and tested features like questing or reward systems. I plan to release a few alpha versions along side Devlogs in the future and I think those would serve better to explain the design choices moving forward. For now, I will just say that I have tried to scrap this idea and I keep gravitating back to it. This tells me that It's worth investing my time into fleshing it out. 

This title will be a steam release for pc. Likely not on any other platform. I'm aiming for a ea (early access) after beta with a lower price tag ($5 - $15 range). Maybe the next Devlog I can go into the planned development roadmap with some rough time scales. Most optimistically, ea release one year from now. the further end wouldn't be more than two years. I really want to drop it before gta6.