Greetings!

Today I'd like to run through the future of GROUND-UNBOUND with you! Before we start, let's get the elephant in the room out the way...

Where have the updates been?

To start, it wasn't planned for GROUND-UNBOUND to be anything more than a fun once off game-jam project, however, we saw the potential in the concepts and wanted to expand upon them further. Since the release in October, I've been working on other projects, enjoying the Holiday season, but most importantly, working on an updated shooter framework.

But now, development is ramping up on the update, and the game is changing in a massive way...

How massive?

Our goal is to shift GROUND-UNBOUND's direction to a CO-OP party game, mixing rogue-like elements in. We've seen games be successful in this venture, and believe there is great growth to be garnered in this genre. We would like to offer a brand-new style of CO-OP party games, a roguelike FPS with the same (but improved) high-intensity movement and shooting you've come to love from GROUND-UNBOUND.

In order to reach this goal, the game needed a fresh start, as the old code was written in a mere 7 days for the game jam.

This update, however, is only the foundation to set up for future content. GROUND-UNBOUND is only just at its beginning, with new expansions coming to the framework set in place by this upcoming update.

When!?

Most developers will agree that setting public deadlines is a terrible idea in a craft with so many variables such as game development (pun intended). Thus, over our time building this update our ideas may shrink or expand, so to account for this we will not be setting any specific public deadline.

With that said, the team has agreed that Q2 of 2022 is when we would like to aim for release. But to reiterate, things can change and we'll be sure to keep you all in the loop with progress.

For now, here's a roadmap of our milestones:

Open Full Size Image

How much change?

Before I go on, I do want to reiterate that plans change and game development is a dynamic thing, so whether this is accurate in a month, only time will tell.

To begin, we're essentially moving away from the initial game jam theme, as the steam version is not held to these constraints; so we're not forcing ourselves to include the whole "falling off the map" mechanic. Instead, the game will be played through a series of rounds, in which players will fight AI as well as each other through a series of hexagon-shaped arenas whilst looting and destroying the enemy AI spawners. Without going into too much detail, many concepts of GROUND-UNBOUND will stay intact.

However, during the concepting phase of this new update, we were able to successfully identify many of the shortcomings of the current available Steam release.

Balance:
Currently, when you play GROUND-UNBOUND, it's incredibly easy to get ahead of the AI and begin to make them far too easy to beat. At this point you're no longer playing till you die, you're playing till you get bored, which doesn't make you want to come back to the game.
Skill Points:
Another contributing factor is that essentially, you have unlimited resources to invest into your skills, meaning you can become incredibly overpowered in every single category. This breaks a fundamental design pillar of roguelikes: "builds." You can't make a build if you can invest in every skill evenly/infinitely.

To address this problem, we're going to be implementing a brand new skill system, which instead of using currency, will use points, and points will be limited. We're still yet to finalize this design, but the issue has been identified and a potential fix has been planned to address it.

This has more positive side-effects if fixed, such as replayability: you now have the opportunity to play again and experience a different build. Maybe this time you will invest more into your speed, then the next you will invest more in your strength. This also will help to keep the multiplayer mode interesting, as you will need to tinker with different skill distributions in order to beat your friends, making every single game you play different from the previous one. Most importantly, you will no longer be playing till you get bored: you'll be playing to survive, and as the AI gets harder and harder and you will inevitably have to either fight the final boss/es or give up and die.

Another change which was hinted at before, boss fights! It was something I wanted to include in GROUND-UNBOUND but never found the implementation that fit considering the falling off the map mechanic meant you could escape at any time. This time around, we'll be integrating boss fights deeply into both Multiplayer and Singleplayer, and they are not going to be easy...

Anything to show?

Definitely, the team has begun the foundational work on identifying style and conceptualizing our approach whilst I program fundamental systems, Here is some cool stuff!