The first prototype of Wieldo is out !

Wieldo is a multiplayer base-building sandbox game I've been working on since the early days of 2022, so it has been a little more than a month now. This is a game project I've been gravitating around for years now, and on which I am finally able to be working fulltime for the coming months.

The game

If you give the game a try (or if you give the screenshots enough scrutiny) you'll notice the experience is currently quite barebone. You can pick blocks up and place them back down. That's about it!

I want to give Wieldo the chance to be developed in the open and suffer the look of everyone who is interested in giving feedback. But that's scary ! Showing off this barebone version is a way to start the ball running and stop worrying about the next prototypes not being good enough to be shared. 

How to play

First you'll need to be running Windows, then grab your keyboard and mouse or your controller. The best way to install the game is through the itch.io app, otherwise you can download the archive, extract it and launch Wieldo.exe.

The controls are as follow:

What you can do

• Destroy: select your hand in the toolbar and press the action button to destroy and pick up the block in front of you.
• Place: select a block in the toolbar and press the action button to place this block in front of you. 

Notes 

• The inventory isn't displayed yet but it's still limiting what you can carry. It has 10 slots that can all contain 99 blocks of the same type. The toolbar groups that all up.
• There is no save at all ! Everything that gets off-screen is in danger to be regenerated when you come back around.
• Multiplayer hosting requires the host to open the corresponding port for UDP.

The plan

Now that Wieldo has an online home here on itch, the plan is to make it grow. But grow into what ?

I don't want to overdesign the game on paper and rather let it grow incrementally, but I do have ideas and inspirations. My most prominent inspirations for Wieldo are Minecraft, Forager and Factorio, for their fantasy of progression, automation and creativity. But I've also been inspired by Zelda the Minish Cap and Dofus (on which I have worked as a game designer for more than 3 years).

Core fantasy design

The way I envision it right now, Wieldo is going to be a power fantasy like most rpgs, but not really centered on the player and more on the world the player(s) build.  In other words, your "power" comes from all the cool stuff you built around you, rather than what your character is on its own. That means no skill tree, characteristic points to spend on your character, and so on. I call this geographical progress.

But I also see creativity, and most of all self-expression, as a core idea of Wieldo. The beauty of sandbox games like most of my inspirations is that everyone can (and does) do it differently and it still works. Self-expression is when geographical progress becomes home :-)

So let's squish it up and say that Wieldo is really about home progress.

Controller, multiplayer and modding

Wieldo is built from the ground up with these constraints in mind:

• Controller support: I want the game to be fully playable with a controller.
• Multiplayer: the ambition for the multiplayer mode is to support a group of friends playing together. The game will only have minimal beyond-the-obvious anti-cheat systems and won't be optimized for more than a handful players at the same time.
• Modding: I am building all the game's data and textures in such a way that external files will be able to override most of the game's content through modpacks (server) and resourcepacks (client). Currently, only builtin files are loaded in this manner.

Roadmap

There a still a LOT of technical things to work on before I can do interesting gameplay stuff like foraging, crafting, mobs or biomes.

The next big steps are:

• A switch between the current mode and a build mode. In the build mode, the character is static and can destroy/place blocks all around them by moving a cursor. Placing blocks in the current style is just tedious and impractical.
• A proper inventory menu.
• A lot of code refactoring, including the rendering of all the sprites.