Hello everyone! This is Outhoused Studios very happy to be bringing you the first devlog of our upcoming game, Echoes in the Deep!

In this devlog, we talk about the steps we've taken so far, which mostly has been about getting to know each other, starting to make decisions like what our studio (or team) name is, what we're each working on, and what our game's about.

Please find our devlog here

Introducing the team

Fernando's been in gamedev for 13 years, and has very versatile gamedev experience. He has a lot of gamedev tech expertise as well as experience in storytelling, and has also been exposed to a variety of game engines. He's released a few games before and has participated in many game jams. He's worked both as a tech lead and as a dev. He's super passionate about game mechanics and loves to game.

Emile has been learning and applying game development and design for the past six years. He loves to create worlds and lore for tabletop role-playing games and video games, and has participated in many game jams. The most important things to him in his work are to foster a positive work environment, to always keep learning and to work as a team.

Ivan is a Unity developer generalist who “freelanced” for the development of many games throughout his career, most notably Pixel Ripped 1989 and Rise of the Third Power. He's known for having the magic touch when it comes to optimizing graphical quality and performance, while producing awesome storytelling segments through visual effects and animations. Jacques, has been dabbling in gamedev in Unity for five or so years. I have no released titles to my name but I've participated in a few gamejams. I'm a hard worker and I'm very proud to be part of a very motivated team.

What we aim to achieve with this project

A good thing about this team is we're really trying to limit and clearly define our scope. As such, our main deliverable for the moment is an MVP in which we showcase really the most basic loop of the larger game we plan to make. This MVP will consist of some number of fights, interspersed with some upgrading segments. At the end, we'd have a boss. This MVP would last about five to ten minutes.As for the game itself, in gameplay it would be a roguelike game with an active combat system. We would have a system similar to that of child of light where instead of the combat being completely turn-based, everyone is essentially racing against time to cast their abilities, we believe this would bring a great sense of dynamism to an already very exciting combat experience. As for lore, for the moment we're leaning on the eldritch dark fantastical side, with no clear commitments as of yet, as we're mostly focused on the functionality of the MVP.

What we've achieved so far

As this is the start of the project, our main achievements so far mainly revolve around setting up the foundations for a successful work environment moving forward

We've so far established

• our studio name, and purchased a domain linked to it
• a Discord server in which we're able to centralize communication with the team
• a code repo on Github
• a means of documenting things; we're using a simple Drive, where we share things like meeting notes and action items, coding standards, game design documents, and so on
• a miro board, where we stay aligned on more visual matters, and for game design feature iteration in the ideation stage
• a means of defining tasks; we're using Trello, it's working really well for us especially given its easy integration with Github

Art ideation, early stages showcase

We've also begun exploring what we want our visual style in the game to look like. Obviously this is a process we will iterate over a few times before we know what we want to keep but for the moment we're exploring art styles in the following styles.

First we have a style which is very similar to one of our big inspirations, darkest dungeon. Note the claustrophobia and closeness we feel with the characters. 

Second we have a further, more JRPG vibe going on, notice the characters are further apart and there are many more layers to this approach, so while it's nice, there are also some impacts to performance.

Thanks so much for reading and following our journey, we'll keep you updated as development occur!

The Outhoused Team