And The Adventure Begins (Again)
So. Uh. Hey everyone. It’s been a while.
As of posting, the last update we gave anyone about our little game project, UNBEATABLE, was 218 days ago. That’s… a while and a half.
Way back in the annuls of D-Cell history, on January 3rd, we went ahead and revealed our game at a little convention called MAGFest.
People seemed to like it?
For those of you who weren’t at MAGFest (or ACEN, where we also demoed the game), by the way, UNBEATABLE is a rhythm-action, sorry, rhythm-adventure video game. Imagine snappy rhythm gameplay with kick-ass music where you punch and kick stuff to the beat, but also a compelling story with heaps of dialogue and places to explore. One Finger Death Punch meets DDR meets Night in the Woods. Arkham Asylum meets BeatMania meets Oxenfree. Of course, I think breaking video games into other video games like this is reductive and bad, so really UNBEATABLE is exactly UNBEATABLE. That’s UNBEATABLE.
But I digress.
Anyway.
Decades went past, the sands of time eroded away at our memories… and we kept on trucking along. Lots and lots and lots of development happened. Programming stuff. Art stuff. Music stuff. Story stuff.
So! I’m sure you’re all dying to know what the game looks like right now. “What magical updates have you put in the game? How much has 218 days let you add to this wonder of wonders?” I can hear you loud and clear.
I present to you… UNBEATABLE:
…okay maybe that’s a little disingenuous.
The game 100 days ago looked more like this:
Looks pretty sick, if I do say so myself.
So what happened? How’d we end up back at Unity default editor screen?
Well, to put it simply: GameMaker Studio 1.4.
JankMaker Studio
GameMaker Studio is a fine tool. It’s great for prototyping, for making small games, for slapping together something in a pinch. It’s compact, it’s efficient, it’s easy to use. I have nothing against GameMaker. I still use it.
But it wasn’t the right fit for UNBEATABLE.
That build up there? Jank as all (nonspecific expletive). We had two audio systems running concurrently, just to get rhythm gameplay AND dynamic audio groups working together. We had were using ridiculous 8k texture atlases just to get parallax working with our backgrounds. No mipmaps or LODs meant we were always loading in the biggest textures. And courtesy of GameMaker, every asset in the game was loaded in, at the same time, on boot-up. Which took a while.
TL;DR It. Was. Bad.
Plus it was missing some real basic features — for example, no FMOD support for our composers/sound designers. Lackluster 3D support, so all the backgrounds were just one big texture. No proper fullscreen render scaling. Poor resolution scaling. GameMaker is lightweight, but that’s because it comes with basically nothing by default. Sure, I could code most of these things in myself, but…was it worth my time?
So we did some talking, and we realized. Hell yeah we had a good thing going. But, it could be better. Continuing down this path would get us an UNBEATABLE, sure, but not one we’d be proud of. We cut our losses and decided — that MAGFest build? Sweet prototype. Real dev starts now.
First thing we did? Decided on a more capable engine. Unity has one of the most robust 2d toolkits on the market right now, so that seemed like our best bet. Sure Godot was picking up steam, and Unreal was up there too, but neither was quite what we were looking for — not as much as Unity was.
Next thing? Story time. The original story was fine — it was originally this Alice in Wonderland decent into madness, which is fine and all, but… it was just way too big. Like, completely unfeasible to do in a reasonable time. So we cut it down to size, a good 3–5 hour narrative with far fewer unique locations, and while we were at it, we made it anime as all hell. I helped write it. I couldn’t resist. It’s very personal to me — a story about anxiety and learning to love your work… but nuh-uh you’re getting no spoilers from me. Sorry. (but it’s good. And I’m not just saying that because I helped on it.)
Then I turned to art. I did lots of art. I made concepts of every location, every background, every character — we needed the visuals nailed to help set the mood and tone of the game in our heads. What would it look like? Feel like? Sound like?
And of course music.
It’s a rhythm game. Of course we worked on music.
And with that. UNBEATABLE 2.0 was born.
What Now?
“So what now?” I hear you ask. Well we’ve got a new identity, a new aesthetic, a new story, (but, of course, the same gameplay) and things have just started to kick back into gear with preproduction sorted.
I’m hard at work in Unity getting back to where we were, TJ and Vas are busy cookin’ up some sick, sick tunes, RJ is toiling away at writing snarky dialogue, Rachel is derailing all our meetings, and Jeff wants me to get this goddamn blog post done already. So, yeah, we’re still at it, and we’re gonna be at it a while longer. But until this thing is ready to ship in 20XX, we’ll be keeping you guys updated right here right now. New posts at least once a month. Probably more. And from everyone on the dev team, too! Updates on music, on art, on story, and on code as we work on it — all the communication you’ve come to expect from a hip indie game dev.
But as for posts right here right now: it’s true! I have an art post up right now! Go check that out!
And thanks for sticking with us this whole time. It means a lot that you didn’t completely forget about us. (And if you did forget, thanks for coming back anyway!)
See you all very, very, soon.
