Exilian

Game Design and Project Resources: The Workshops Quarter => Computer Game Development - The Indie Alley => Topic started by: Roov on March 16, 2016, 07:47:56 PM

Title: Will of the Gods - An Arcade God vs God Smackdown!
Post by: Roov on March 16, 2016, 07:47:56 PM

Hello you beautiful and curious bunch of people!

I'm really excited to share the game me and my buddies have been working on, so without further a do, Comrades Inc. would like to present:

(http://i.imgur.com/jspiysA.png)

Will of the Gods is a 1v1 top-down arcade God vs God Smackdown! Guide your faithful to your temple, while smiting the heathens following the other 'God'.

The game was first created for the 2016 Global Game Jam at Breda, the Netherlands, where it won Second Place and the People's Choice Award. Seeming like a fun project and something we'd love to develop more, we set sail for Steam Greenlight and recently rebooted working on the game. Have a look at our GGJ gameplay video:

As of now we are working on the game art, adding more content(gamemodes), better music and UI. We're generally trying to make everything better.

Our Website  (http://www.willofthegods.com/) / Our Twitter (https://twitter.com/willofthegods)

Expect an update every week from us! For instance this week we went from this:

(http://i.imgur.com/YGfB7dqm.jpg)

To a brighter more colorful, low poly style:

(http://i.imgur.com/AaVE90bl.png) (http://i.imgur.com/Us7kS6Nl.png)
(http://i.imgur.com/IUfLX4el.png) (http://i.imgur.com/NO0qMcul.png)

I'd love to hear what you guys think! I'd actually love some tips on how to handle twitter, as previous to this I didn't use the platform at all and gathering a community on it seems quite hard at the moment.

Cheers!

Title: Re: Will of the Gods - An Arcade God vs God Smackdown!
Post by: Jubal on March 16, 2016, 10:41:37 PM

I'm the one who runs our twitter, and I don't think I understand it either - generally twitter mostly seems to work well as a communications rather than a publicity platform. Both FB and Twitter have search and suggestion algorithms that really punish smaller organisations or businesses in my experience. It's nice for communicating with people you've already got, and I use it reasonably effectively when I have time for hyper-targeted advertising (aka literally singling out individual people or projects that look like they're up Exilian's street), but gaining followers is really tough (and also seemingly subject to laws of scale, the bigger you are the more you get).

Aaanyway - the game itself. The tiny people are adorable! It's a really nice mechanic as well - very simple (it's the sort of mechanic one could easily put in a boardgame, though with the addition of being real time). What modes are you planning to add?

Title: Re: Will of the Gods - An Arcade God vs God Smackdown!
Post by: Roov on March 17, 2016, 04:14:26 PM

Quote from: Jubal on March 16, 2016, 10:41:37 PM

I'm the one who runs our twitter, and I don't think I understand it either - generally twitter mostly seems to work well as a communications rather than a publicity platform. Both FB and Twitter have search and suggestion algorithms that really punish smaller organisations or businesses in my experience. It's nice for communicating with people you've already got, and I use it reasonably effectively when I have time for hyper-targeted advertising (aka literally singling out individual people or projects that look like they're up Exilian's street), but gaining followers is really tough (and also seemingly subject to laws of scale, the bigger you are the more you get).

Aaanyway - the game itself. The tiny people are adorable! It's a really nice mechanic as well - very simple (it's the sort of mechanic one could easily put in a boardgame, though with the addition of being real time). What modes are you planning to add?

I think I agree with you on Twitter - seems like the smaller you are the harder it is to get noticed. That stands for pretty much everything though. I do like your suggestion to just go for a personal contact, it worked for me, didn't it!  ;D

Right now we're in the process of picking which mutators we'd like to see in the game. Some of our ideas include:
Thor's Party - Causes lightning strikes in random locations
Purpose - Followers have 2x the speed
Messiah - Villages sometimes spawn a bigger follower who gives 3x the points
God Almighty - Players can now cast wind on enemy followers as well.

We're open for ideas though! We're also talking about whether or not you would be able to activate many modiers at the same time. It would be a ton of fun but it could very much just break the game most of the time  ;D

Title: Re: Will of the Gods - An Arcade God vs God Smackdown!
Post by: Jubal on March 17, 2016, 06:52:55 PM

Aye - personal contacts are tougher to make for target audiences and potential buyers/downloaders though.

I like the sounds of those - I guess one question is whether you want to pick or stick to a certain real pantheon for them, or whether you want to diversify between pantheons, or just do whatever wherever. The stepped temple design feels slightly Greek/Roman/Middle eastern to me, so one of those groups of gods might be worth going for? Then you have a nice theme that you can slot your mutators into :)

Title: Re: Will of the Gods - An Arcade God vs God Smackdown!
Post by: Cuddly Khan on March 17, 2016, 10:12:27 PM

Villages spawn slightly fast? Don't know how much fast.  You'd have to balance it through testing and such somehow.

Title: Re: Will of the Gods - An Arcade God vs God Smackdown!
Post by: Jubal on March 17, 2016, 10:32:42 PM

Not sure, I think they need to spawn fairly constantly because the mechanic of having bigger/smaller blocks of people for "conversions" is important.

Title: Re: Will of the Gods - An Arcade God vs God Smackdown!
Post by: Roov on March 18, 2016, 07:44:27 AM

Faster spawns seems like it could be really fun, especially when combined with other 'mutators'! It's still up in the air whether or not we should let players create something insane by combining a few of them.

In the old visual style we were going for a more celtic look but now we're working on changing it. We've decided that our two 'Gods'(players) shall be the almighty Triangle and Square Gods! We were talking about perhaps putting in some mini-narrative about the two feuding Gods, being angry at each other because one of the amount of corners they each have.

Title: Re: Will of the Gods - An Arcade God vs God Smackdown!
Post by: Cuddly Khan on March 18, 2016, 10:38:34 AM

An alternate game mode where spawns are twice as frequent and they more two times faster. Could be interesting indeed if not a bit hectic. ;)

Title: Re: Will of the Gods - An Arcade God vs God Smackdown!
Post by: Jubal on March 19, 2016, 10:15:10 PM

Ooh, geometry.  :)

Are you going to give the two different mutators? Or possibly let the players select an "arsenal" of 2-3 they can use before game start?

Title: Re: Will of the Gods - An Arcade God vs God Smackdown!
Post by: Roov on March 24, 2016, 08:20:42 AM

Art update! Polished this level and added some useless, yet adorable critters.

(http://i.imgur.com/qnAkxthl.png) (http://i.imgur.com/WRVfiXPl.png)

And our temples have a proper look now, too!

(http://i.imgur.com/XgR97u1l.png) (http://i.imgur.com/kYmBC5Cl.png)

Already got a few modifiers like '2x speed' working  ;D

Title: Re: Will of the Gods - An Arcade God vs God Smackdown!
Post by: Jubal on March 26, 2016, 10:50:26 PM

Block cows :D

Also is it just me or are those chickens kind of gigantic?

Title: Re: Will of the Gods - An Arcade God vs God Smackdown!
Post by: Roov on April 07, 2016, 11:12:40 AM

Yeah, they are pretty big  ;D We tried a realistic size and you could barely see them ingame!

Title: Re: Will of the Gods - An Arcade God vs God Smackdown!
Post by: Jubal on April 07, 2016, 11:17:59 AM

An ostrich sized chicken would be terrifying, they scratch people badly enough at normal size sometimes!

On the other hand, feed a family of four with a one egg omelette!

Title: Re: Will of the Gods - An Arcade God vs God Smackdown!
Post by: Roov on April 08, 2016, 04:33:04 PM

Oh god. We did have an idea to have a hostile mob walking around killing/fearing your followers - an ostrich sounds evil.

Meanwhile!

Gameplay video!

Title: Re: Will of the Gods - An Arcade God vs God Smackdown!
Post by: Jubal on April 08, 2016, 04:55:18 PM

Nice! And yes, occasional hostile forces would be fun I think. Is the giant follower at 3:26 literally just meant to be a giant? :)

Title: Re: Will of the Gods - An Arcade God vs God Smackdown!
Post by: Roov on April 13, 2016, 07:29:42 AM

The big guys are indeed big, yet not giants - they give you 3x the points, but are a bit slow. We'll be making them easier to distinguish, probably gonna give them  hats or something  ;D

Title: Re: Will of the Gods - An Arcade God vs God Smackdown!
Post by: Jubal on April 17, 2016, 06:47:43 PM

Ah, cool :)

Title: Re: Will of the Gods - An Arcade God vs God Smackdown!
Post by: Roov on May 18, 2016, 01:03:01 PM

Hello to all the curious peeps who somehow wound up in this thread! 'Scuse me for the absence of updates but its been quite busy! I do, however, have a bunch of fancy updates

We've got two new maps to show off:

Crystal Creek:

(http://i.imgur.com/5cqxCe6.png) (http://i.imgur.com/UWbpr0w.png)

And the Dusty Gulch!

(http://i.imgur.com/Q3vickO.png)(http://i.imgur.com/AsCns2y.png)

We also have a fancy new UI!

(http://i.imgur.com/ghBBQql.png)

But probably the most exciting of all is that we're releasing our game to Steam Greenlight on... Friday! Yes, in just 2 days. We're all quite excited but we still have some work to do. Our trailer should be done tomorrow so expect that as well!

Also, me and the rest of our team would like to thank you guys for being such an awesome community!

P.S. Sorry for the image heavy post

Title: Re: Will of the Gods - An Arcade God vs God Smackdown!
Post by: Jubal on May 18, 2016, 11:30:26 PM

The penguins look super serious :P Those maps are great though, good work!

Let me know when the Greenlight campaign starts and I'll get some things out on our twitter :)

Title: Re: Will of the Gods - An Arcade God vs God Smackdown!
Post by: Roov on May 20, 2016, 01:43:21 PM

Finished our trailer!  ;D

And our Greenlight Page is up!  (http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=659807335)

Thanks for the attention  :)

Title: Re: Will of the Gods - An Arcade God vs God Smackdown!
Post by: Jubal on May 20, 2016, 04:52:05 PM

Duly upvoted on Greenlight, scheduled a bunch of promotion on the twitter feed, and posted on our FB :)

Trailer looks great, best of luck!

Title: Re: Will of the Gods - An Arcade God vs God Smackdown!
Post by: Roov on May 26, 2016, 11:21:13 AM

Woah, thanks a ton for all the support! We seem to be doing alright, but as anticipated, all traffic basically dies after the game dropped from the 'Recent Submissions'. Hope we got enough while it lasted!

Title: Re: Will of the Gods - An Arcade God vs God Smackdown!
Post by: Jubal on May 26, 2016, 12:30:45 PM

I've never really looked into the system - how long do you sit in Greenlight for, is it just "until you get enough votes" or?

Title: Re: Will of the Gods - An Arcade God vs God Smackdown!
Post by: Roov on May 28, 2016, 09:16:04 AM

It's actually a bit of a mystery! You apparently (or so people think, at least) need to have a good Yes/No vote ratio and at least X votes... or something.

However...

(http://i.imgur.com/fRxWX9K.png)

We just got Greenlit!  ;D ;D It feels so freaking awesome! We couldn't have done it without you!

Title: Re: Will of the Gods - An Arcade God vs God Smackdown!
Post by: Jubal on May 28, 2016, 01:13:50 PM

Fantastic news - well done! :D

Title: Re: Will of the Gods - An Arcade God vs God Smackdown!
Post by: Clockwork on May 28, 2016, 02:26:40 PM

That's great guys, congrats :)