Devlog 1 - Astrohaulers (Early Stages and Design)

(Legacy post - Originally posted on website 5/5/24) - https://fernsproutstudios.wixsite.com/fern-sprout-studios/post/devlog-2

Hello, and welcome to the first Fern Sprout Studios Devlog!

A what? A Devlog? What is that?

Devlog is short for “Developer Log”. We plan on using our website to help track and showcase our game development process. These updates will come out every few weeks during the development cycle to track the progress of our games.

With our first entry, we will be going over the creation and initial early development of Astrohaulers! At this point, Astrohaulers has been in development for approximately 3 months.

From the beginning, we wanted to create our first game in a shorter time frame, to help our team members unfamiliar with development tools to dip their feet into the water and get acclimated with the process of developing an indie game. We sought to have a demonstrable product to showcase for the Oregon Innovation Challenge to pitch the idea of our studio.

Gameplay

Our first idea that stuck operated under the nickname “Project Courier”. The main concept of Project Courier was a logistics management game, where the player would operate under a shipping and logistics company. The player would control different couriers and plan routes, and the game would slowly build complexity and intensity as time went on. There were ideas for different courier, pathway, and location variables, such as speed, obstacles, risk, and more. Over the course of development, we decided to roll back on the complexity and scale of the game, and chose to refocus with our mission as a group, which was to build a polished and enjoyable game within the time frame that we set for ourselves.

The gameplay loop started out consistent and simple: create paths between space stations, packages spawn at space stations periodically. The player has to direct ships accordingly to deliver packages to the different stations. We have cycled through (and continue to test) iterations for package decay time, reputation, and game over conditions. Scrapped features include upgrading ships and stations along with game speed modifiers, which we removed for scope purposes as mentioned earlier, along with others planned originally in our design documentation.

Stylistic choices

Once we decided to move forward with Project Courier, we had to come together as a team to decide on the design and style of the game. We each brainstormed a number of topics and settings for the game to take place within, and ended up going with the theme of “galactic space truckers”. We decided we wanted a pixelated and arcade style to the game, which began the influence upon the audio and visual creative aspects of the game. Because of the guidelines we created for this game ahead of time, we were not strict about the direction that the art grew into. The visual style moved more towards the direction of spaceships and space stations, but maintained the same general theme/idea. Art assets have developed into higher quality as time has moved on, going through 3 major iterations - programmer art, version 1 (lower resolution, static pixel designs), and version 2 (higher resolution, animated pixel designs). Sound and music has maintained consistency, with a focus on lofi processing to mirror the visuals of the game.

Upcoming plans (Pre Launch)

Since most aspects of the game are nearing completion, we are currently focusing our energy on finishing up changes, testing, and adding POLISH everywhere. We want this experience to be simple and enjoyable for players.

Thanks for reading up on our first developer log. Stay tuned for our launch developer log soon!