Greetings and salutations! I am pleased to welcome you to our very first Devlog!

My name is Alice, and I am the community manager here at BrightLink. I will be the one who posts these community posts and other updates about the game. It's a pleasure to meet you all! Before we get into the details about what we have been doing for the past few weeks, allow me to tell you a little about us. We are a small indie team called "BrightLink", consisting of 7 students from a Norwegian school called "Danvik Folkehøgskole", with our teacher acting as our producer.  Our team has varying levels of experience, but all of us have been studying game design and development for a year already. We are all passionate and excited to bring more smiles and games to the world of gaming. But before I start getting into what we are currently working on, I will talk a little about how we got here. So let's skip the pleasantries and get down to brass tax.

The process so far:

Even though we haven't been making our game for more than a week, we have already been at work for a month, figuring out exactly what we are going to make. To do this, we have been through a pitching process, where we come up with an idea, and pitch it to our "investors" (teachers and others). We have done this three times so far, and landed on our final result last week. But just for fun, here were the three different ideas we pitched.

- Our first pitch was called "CATastrophy" and was a city building, tower defense game with cat and mice having swapped roles. It would be made for PC and be in a 3D, mid poly style. Think if you combined cities skylines and bloons in a way. This was of course our first pitch, and whilst there were a lot of good things about it, there was some confusion for both some of the team members, and the investors. Therefore, the idea was not greenlit, and we began work on our next pitch.

 

- Pitch number two was for a game called "Brogi the Apprentice" which was a metroidvania platformer, with a 2D pixel art artstyle. Whilst it was supposed to be released and made for Mobile, in the end we ended up designing it for PC, hoping we could change platforms after the pitch. Of course, the investors clearly spotted we didn't want to make a mobile game. Brogi was also going to have a very cute and innocent aesthetic, only for Brogi to splatter and explode when he dies. This pitch was not greenlit as well. We also had a guest investor for the second pitch: Adrian Husby Tingstad, who is one of the founders of Krillbite, and currently works for Carbonara.  We are thrilled that he was able to show up for our pitch, and the feedback he gave was invaluable.

- The third and final pitch is the game we went with, called "Mystic Mixology - name pending". It's a couch co-op party game where you play as witches/mages, who mix and craft magical potions and items, before selling to the townsfolk. But be careful, if the townsfolk get dissatisfied with your products, it won't be long before you burn at the stake :) It will be 3D mid poly in terms of style, and will support up to 4 players, whilst being primarily made for consoles, but will be released on PC to begin with. It was the pitch we were the most passionate and creative with, and are already hard at work making this product a reality. We did get a guest at this pitch as well though! Ole Andreas Haley, who was also one of the founders of Krillbite, and currently works with Funcom as a senior producer. It was good to get an angle and insight on how a senior producer works and thinks, and it was an absolute delight getting to pitch for him.

With the third pitch being the one we went with, we have been hard at work for the past week making a functional prototype, featuring the most core mechanics present in the game. So far we have gotten a lot of the core mechanics working, as well as having made some placeholder assets, and creating various design documents detailing the creative and mechanical aspects of the game itself. Whilst we don't have much we can show just yet, given we have only been working actively on this for a week or so, we should be able to show more this coming friday. 

What's next?

But whilst we have already done a lot, we still have a lot of things we plan to get done before the next Devlog.  Some of which including finishing the logo for our student company, Brightlink. We also intend to finish more of the core game mechanics, and finish the design documents, as well as conducting our very first internal playtest over the coming days. We are excited to share more about our project in the coming weeks, and are always looking for feedback and suggestions from you all.

Till next time!