Great Gun Gauntlet Development Roadmap
On this page you'll find an overview of the planned features we hope to add throughout the Early Access version of GGG, we are hoping to add an extensive amount of content to really flesh out the game over development, but with so much potential content we want to release as early as possible to gauge player interest or potential problems.
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This page might not look pretty, but it should contain a lot of useful information about our development progress.
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It is also worth noting that these are our plans, but they are plans that are very much subject to change, none of these features are guaranteed and our plans may change especially if players show a notable disinterest in certain ideas.
The first version number releasing to Early Access is version 0.7, but before that we released an alpha demo a while ago that was labeled as v0.6. This first section of the timeline includes details from that original demo including a few notes on where we considered it to be lacking such as the music and stability. A large portion of what we did in this original demo had to be redone for the full version, but that is somewhat expected as this project has been our primary learning process for Unity and game development in general.
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On these timeline images you'll find some color coding next to the features listed, we're planning on updating these images as a good way to keep people up to date with where we are in development.
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Fun fact: These images ended up being revised even before this page finally went live, the scope of how much we wanted done before Early Access changed a lot and many assets ended up becoming priority after I made the original versions of these.
This next section is what needs to be complete before the Early Access version has its initial launch, when this entire v0.7 section is labeled as blue/Fully Completed or green/Needs Polish you can know a release date is coming soon.
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For a game like this a huge bulk of the work is finishing the back end systems and implementing the core game objects that we call Obstacles, a good few of these are easy such as the Boxes, others aren't so easy such as the new Gravity Generators. What we've found surprisingly challenging about making this game is the whole conveyor system, needing objects to react with physics but also move along these conveyors convincingly has been quite the experience, much harder than just spawning enemies that come in through doorways like a standard arena game.
The conveyors are also hard to work with visually, due to how bad stuttering looks and needing particles to move with them.
Below is a more in-depth list of what obstacles should be available by the v0.7 release, and where they are in
completion. Many wont be blue/Fully Complete by release as completing final texture work may take time.
Once v0.7 releases and those initial obstacles are added to the game, v0.8 and onwards will be focused on fleshing out everything else surrounding the core gameplay. For a game like this it can't be understated how notable it is that once we have a collection of obstacles to work with we really do just need to spend a lot of time developing all kinds of content variety using said obstacles. The pattern generating system we use to make the gauntlets for the arenas was also a big portion of development, with that in a complete state it is wild just how much more we can do with it compared to the demo and as the designer working with it writing this I'm actually quite excited to see how far I can go with it.
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The only worry I have working on this project at this point is not knowing how long completing a lot of this content will take?
Individually gauntlets don't take that much time to make, but 10 of them per arena and 6 arenas is essentially 60 levels of content to finish. This is where, if we are being extremely honest for a moment, we may cut back on promised content if player interest isn't very high for getting more, if people seem satisfied getting 3-4 arenas and are instead more interested in the ideas of the Missions Mode then focus could indeed shift.
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Speaking of Missions Mode, the last notable details to talk about for now are the extras that may be included if the game is a hit with people.
Missions Mode is the main one we expect/hope to develop down the line, in simple it would be like a collection of mini-gauntlets with very specific challenges to complete, this allows it to explore concepts outside of what Survival Mode has but also allows for a secondary type of progression system that we hope players will find very rewarding to complete.
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If the game is popular Party Mode would be a fun late addition, this would be the unified location for any strange extra play styles we come up with or forms of gameplay customization.
The Great Gun Gauntlet section of our News page contains more in-depth development updates if you are interested in keeping up with ongoing updates or if you would like to see a more detailed backlog of development history.