Arcade Galaxy Dev Log — June 2022
TAKING THE ART OF PLAY TO THE NEXT LEVEL
ALL-NEW SUMMER UPDATES & PREVIEWS
The Arcade Galaxy team is proud to be sharing more about our development process! Even more progress has been made between June and early July, so we’re taking the time to offer our community another monthly deep dive…
This time, we have some more updates on map design, gameplay direction, art assets, in addition to some behind-the-scenes insight into how the team is tackling some of the challenges of pushing this Arcade experience to the next level. Key elements of the project are being finalized through iterative milestones, and everyone is feeling thrilled about the level of collaboration that is making this ambitious project possible.
ART DIRECTION
As announced in our May Dev Log, we’re happy to have Macaca Games on board with us! We are sharing duties with Macaca’s talented art team, making moves to standardize the art pipeline for Cubs, accessories, and more through this expedited design process.
The art team has also been iterating on the overall look and feel of the Arcade Galaxy world, settling on some unique shader effects as we continue to design and implement the aforementioned Cub avatars.
As far as level assets, the AUGUST ALPHA TEST version is planned to include more generic objects for the sake of visual clarity and giving the team an appropriate amount of time to fine-tune the feel of the game as visual themes begin to coalesce. Stay tuned on our social channels for updates on this alpha target in the coming weeks!
FAST, FUN, FURIOUS GAMEPLAY
As developers, our team has a high standard for what players should expect from how our game feels and controls. We had a lot of fun with internal tests, as it is important that we set ourselves up to reach that quality level by finding out what works and what doesn’t. In that respect, we’re constantly pushing for more polish as we continue to design and implement the vehicle-based action of Arcade Galaxy.
For many weeks, our focus has been on making sure that the control of our vehicles are fun, precise, and responsive to player input. We are including obstacles and variety in our initial set of levels, which means that the driving model should complement that aspect of the game. This combination lends itself to our goal of recreating the fantastical fun of arcade gaming, and we are continuing to adjust parameters in our vehicle control to get the best feel for players.
SUPPORTING PLAYER CREATIVITY
One of the core features being developed is the Creator’s Tool which allows users to bring their imagination to life through the worlds of Arcade Galaxy. We’re aiming to support unique maps, modes, and experiences through our community.
With this in mind, we’re excited to see how user-generated content can push this experience even farther than we originally envisioned. However, there is a serious amount of work that goes into making this core feature as flexible as possible.
Currently, we are experimenting with a lightweight, user-friendly runtime logic editor which is fully integrated with our map editor. Our goal is to ensure that this is not as complicated as a traditional, node-based visual scripting. Editing game logic should be as streamlined as possible to serve the user experience — our approach is by applying stacks of blocks to edit game properties.
The initial focus for the team has been editing the logic for Objects/Traps within a scene. What we have planned are Event (Triggers/Collision), Motion (Move/Rotate/Scale/Show/Hide), Operator (Add/Subtract/Multiply/Divide), and Control (Conditions/Loops) blocks to affect in-game behaviors. The purpose of these specific blocks are to allow users to design their own combinations of blocks so that each scene is a creative sandbox in terms of behaviors, effects, and rules.
OVERCOMING TECHNICAL LIMITATIONS
In terms of challenges, the logic editor is dependent on relatively low-level programming. That is part of the reason why the implementation for this creation feature is distinct from coding the mechanics of Arcade Galaxy.
One major factor is that the team hast to handle the usability and extent of the user’s ability to affect the core game. To achieve this, we are using encapsulation so that the user can easily edit scene logic without triggering any errors or exploits in the build.
Another challenge is building for multiple platforms, including web and mobile. At the same time, we are also migrating our multiplayer framework to a new one as we turn our attention towards the August Alpha Build.
FINAL THOUGHTS
The upcoming Alpha Build is important as it gives us the opportunity to get feedback from the community. Balancing, finding the fun, and fixing those urgent tech issues are some of our top priorities during this stretch.
As always, thank you for sticking with us as we continue to build Arcade Galaxy! We are incredibly motivated and passionate about this project, and it has been a blast seeing it come to life through several stages of development.
Follow us on our SOCIALS for the latest news and events, as we are nearing some of our greatest milestones — including the first community alpha test! See you all soon…
