Today marks my first devlog post of 2015 and roughly three months of development on Gunmetal Arcadia. Feels like a good time for a recap and a look at what’s next.

The earliest seed of the idea for Gunmetal Arcadia that I can find dates all the way back to May 2012, just weeks after I released You Have to Win the Game. I sent myself an email with the subject line “Short-form procedurally generated Zelda 2 dungeon crawler” and some notes on what this might entail. I didn’t pursue the idea at the time, but it stuck with me. It wasn’t the right choice for Super Win, but as I was demoing that game and pondering future projects, it came around again. This time, I described it as “Super Win with combat” and cited Battle of Olympus as another point of reference. I also wrote down “Ghosts of Arcadia” as a potential title. The “ghosts” part of this title was a nod to the idea that previous sessions would influence future sessions, possibly even with previous characters appearing as literal ghosts a la NetHack.

A few months passed. I continued to take notes on this concept and play more NES games for inspiration. Eventually, I decided that I had already exhausted the concepts of ghosts and dreams in Super Win, and I landed on Gunmetal Arcadia as a title that more accurately represented the game I envisioned.

I set up this blog at the very end of September, just before Super Win launched, and I created a repository for Gunmetal a few days later. I was in the process of moving to a new apartment, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to spend all my time working on a new game, but I wanted to hack out some features to immediately distinguish this game from its predecessor. I started with game feel, finding the appropriate weight and sense of movement for the player character.

It was around the middle of November that I had finally settled into the new place and hit the ground running on full-time Gunmetal dev. Some of my first goals were to revisit the toolset I had developed for Super Win and level it up for my Gunmetal needs. I expect this will be a continual thing throughout development, especially as I tackle procedural level generation at some point in the future.

The last month and a half have been a scattershot series of feature adds roughly centered on growing the set of actions available to the player on a moment-to-moment basis. I’ve discussed melee combat and ladder traversal in previous entries; this week, I also added destructible terrain and bombs. Bit by bit, the number of things you can do in my test level is growing, on top of whatever features already existed in Super Win (doors, dialog boxes, collectables, and so on).

There are some notable omissions in the current feature set. Although I have a melee weapon that collides with the environment, I don’t yet have enemies. I don’t have powerups. I don’t have any concept of health bars, damage, dying, or permadeath. I don’t have procedural level generation; that will likely be one of the last features to come online, as I want to be able to prove I can make a single handcrafted level fun before attempting to make random computer-generated levels fun. Three months in, there’s still a lot of things that need to happen before this starts to feel like a game. And that’s probably fine. I don’t have a specific timeline for this project, but my experience with previous games has been that the upfront feature implementation tends to move quickly and goes the furthest towards establishing a quality bar for the game. I don’t want to get into Super Win postmortem territory, but I probably could have spent more time building features for that game, and I want to make sure I give Gunmetal the time it needs.

One last note: I tried streaming some live development last week, and it was pretty fun, so I’ll probably give it another go at some point. I haven’t yet figured out exactly what day or days will work best for that, but you can follow me on Twitch if you’re interested in checking it out.