Devlog #00

This is going to be a devlog/braindump of thoughts and ideas about where the game is at now, versus where I want it to go in the future. I’m a solo dev, which means while polishing and refining things takes a long time, rapid prototyping of ideas is incredibly fast. As such, the goal for this game, and this devlog series is to get the community involved in the game making process. Both with me providing insight into why I’ve made the choices I have, and taking on feedback from an early stage.

What is Orestorm Factory

Orestorm Factory is a BulletHell Roguelike where you build a factory of drills and processors to loot a cave, while dodging your way past enemies and your own deadly machinery along the way.

Whoami

I’m Fourbius, this is my first commercial game, the demo is now available to play, with the completed version of the game coming next year, although I plan on continuing development once the game is completed and pumping out new patches until I’m cold and/or dead. You can grab a copy of the demo now on steam, and leave a Wishlist on your way out.

What is Orestorm Factory really

On a more conceptual level, I like to think of it as a factory building game where you get to restart from zero every time. I find the start of any incremental game to be the most fun, as the orders of magnitude are a lot easier to comprehend when they’re smaller. Eg. People struggle to picture how much more a billion is than a million, but everyone has intuition on how much doubling or tripling productivity is.

Clashing Genres

Some of you may be asking, why a factory building bullet hell roguelike?
And to be honest, I’m not too sure how I ended up here either. The game started as a factory building game where rather than use conveyor belts, objects just slid along an icey floor. Then I considered putting in turrets like you’d see in a tower defense game, but I held off on this idea as I feel like that's the most common next step in these games after building a mining system. so I experimented with just having the enemies be hurt by the ores as they were, and this turned out to be surprisingly pleasant, as there were no range restrictions, so you can shoot ore off to the other side of the map to kill mobs if you want.
From there it made sense to try having the player take damage form the ores as well because the ores are already known for damaging stuff at this point and it would keep things more consistent. I playtested it and I instantly fell in love with it. When you accidentally make a messy hodgepodge of a factory, you end up making it intensely difficult on yourself to get around. Then with the addition of an enemy that shoots from afar to always keep the player moving, the main gameplay loop was pretty much locked in.

One of the playtesters compared the dodging of ores to the flash game “The worlds hardest game”, and I think that's a really apt way to consider the action elements. It’s not a high octane game like Thumper, but the simplicity brings with it an incredible flow state once you get into the swing of it.

The Demo

For the demo I wanted to demonstrate the key game ideas. Mining ores, building an ever growing base, slowly expanding out. Eventually losing control of the base and having to survive a bullet hell style challenge against the boss or a big wave of ghosts.

I ended up removing a lot of prototyped buildings from the demo to keep this initial gameplay experience refined and to make it easier to polish and bugtest the ones that are currently in there. I think the demo does a great job of giving players a feel for the game, and basically is a complete experience, with a final bossfight and a hard mode. But the mechanics are reasonably shallow, especially in regard to buildings that take inputs and produce outputs. Hopefully this will make players excited to explore the full game when it comes out.

Problems

The problems I need to solve between now and go live.

The biggest problem I still have to work on is repetition. While I love starting a new run, they do start to blur together right now as the variance between runs is quite limited. So my current big conundrum is how can I add variance that doesn’t detract from the overall game experience. The ideas I’ve been playing around with (some in game, others on a whiteboard) are:

• Custom building blueprints that do unique things.
• Items that provide movement tech, and affect enemies such that you can build combos and synergies.
• Limitations to force players to adapt to new circumstances. For example, how does being spawned in a biome that stops you placing switches affect how you play.
• Adding significant variance to enemies and maps such that the player needs to adapt their playstyle.

The Boss

I really like the way the boss forces you to build your base almost like a boss arena to prepare to fight it. My plan is to make lots of bosses that each require this kind of logic and strategy. I've also got the boss versions of the Slime and Crystal bosses mostly fleshed out, but they still need a lot of playtesting and bug fixing so I held off putting them in the demo.

The Future

The game needs a significant UI overhaul to allow for far more buildings to be added. As such I wanted the first public playtest version to have a simple enough set of buildings, with some incremental power increases so players can get a feel for how the whole game will feel.

Graphics

While I love the current graphics, I plan on doing significant graphics changes between now and the final release. I plan to add a lot of juiciness to the game art and animations that I never got around to, as I didn’t want to spend time doing things like animating crisp death animations for sprites that are going to be replaced.

I also plan to overhaul the GUI once I’m confident in what the wireframes for all the features are going to look like.

The World

Currently I’m stuck between two map ideas:

• A small procedurally generated floor that you must beat to progress to the next floor, leading to a tower of smaller challenges in changing biomes.
  • This is good because you can ramp difficulty, start adding environmental complexity throughout the run, and put multiple bosses in a single run. It also means I can curate the world a lot more granularly. This also makes sure that the game shouldn’t ever have processing issues, even on really old PCs.
• An infinitely large world that renders the terrain as you first explore it.
  • This is good because the world can support massive factories, and the factory building component can get really bulked out. Players love exploring an infinitely vast world, and it means I could potentially add some kind of train network. Although there's less incentive to use them since moving ores is very cheap in resources compared to other factory building games.

Mods

The backend code isn’t really built in a way that would make game modding convenient, and as the game is still going to have some pretty radical changes in the future (Multi level maps, different bosses etc) I’m not too worried about this just yet. However, In the future I do want to write some mod harnesses for the Enemies, Buildings, Ores, and Maps, such that it will be a lot easier for players to modify and share custom enemies, buildings, ores, and maps.

The goal is for these mod wrappers and this to be packaged in the initial release.

PVP and Co-Op

Splitscreen PVP and PVE is reasonably easy with this one, presuming I can get a workaround for requiring 2 mice right now. Doing it over networking might cause some issues, I haven’t done significant diagnostics on how much net traffic would be required, but this is definitely something I’d be looking into, probably after the initial release. It really depends on timelines. I've done games with netcode so I'm not too worried about implementation.

Thanks

That’s basically all my thoughts at this stage. If you want to get involved in the process, you can try the demo on steam, and join the discord server to get involved in the conversation.