Hi guys.

Here is the link.
https://zebthan.itch.io/gladius-terrae

I'm a professional software engineer and a gamer since I was a kid (which was, well, a long time ago).

Usually, I'm working with something totally different than games, but I have always wanted to make one. And a few months ago, I finally decided to give it a go. I recruited my friend, who is more of an art soul than I am (I can't do art at all), and we started working. Initially, we didn't even know what we wanted to do, and our little project came a long way before it became what it is today. It is still only the beginning, and we have a lot of ideas and plans for development. I'm very glad we started doing this because it gives me a lot of satisfaction watching it grow. So, I wanted to share my experience.



Right now that UI is pretty bad, but trust me, it was worse. Way worse. It still needs improvements. One of the things that surprised me was how difficult it is to create an interface that isn't a pain to use. But it will do for now.

I don't know if others agree, but I love her art style. It kinda reminds me of the old beat'em up games, and I loved them when I was a kid. 

Right now, we are mostly focused on adding new weapons, monsters, and traits, as the game lacks content. One of the monsters on the screen above is not even animated yet.

I love going back to the past when a lot of the things in the game looked differently. For example, that is one of the initial character designs.I still haven't removed these graphics from the game files. But looking at how things looked and worked at the beginning compared to how they work now makes me really exited to see the game in the next few months. I wonder what we will achieve.

Another signifficant change.

You can upgrade weapons. I mean, this was always an option. Initially I thought about a system, where you need a copy of a weapon to upgrade it. This didn't work well, so I decided to introduce completely different system. Now every weapon can be sold for components, and these components can be used to upgrade weapon instead. This changed more than I thought but I must say this system does feel better. I should improve it's visuals tho.

I also found out, that some things are very easy to implement, when being quite useful, but somehow, they feel not that important. Like pausing a game. That's an obvious feature, but when building a game it was always somewhere in the back and always something was more important. I think adding to each update at least one such small improvement can make the game overally better over time. I will test this aproach since now.

Sometimes the initial idea proves to be useless at best. As with this guy:

Soooooo, he meant to be a slow moving tank. Time proved that in my game, there is simply no place for such slow enemies. They simply pose no threat whatsoever, because they are so easy to outmaneuver.
I needed to make him something else, so I changed  him to something closer to a support. He is still slow and tough, but now he speeds up enemies in his proximity and spawn some smaller guys, while he is no longer capable of attacking directly. But let's face it - does he look like he can somehow attack directly?  Cooldown for spawn seems a little long now, but I feel that it's better to make it to long now, than making the game impossible by making these guys swarm the map with their spawns. Will see how it will unfold and make it shorter if neccesary. 

It was a while. We've made a signifficant progress in the last three months. We have upgradable classes now, more weapons, an elite/boss like enemy, but most importantly - we have changed some of the core mechanics.

At the very beggining of the game, the main objective of each day was to reach certain point. Nothing else. It was boring, and not so great, so we changed it into timed waves. It was better, but we have changed it back again to reaching that certain spot. Why?

Because we have added missions. Right now you have a certain objective or a few of them. Right now there is only one type of objective, but in the future, there will be more. This gave the game some sense of purpose - it is no longer pointless shotouts, and we will totally gonna develop more into that. It also changed one thing. Before, killing enemies gave experience. This is a common solution. However this turns enemies into crops that you farm. And here enemies are what enemies are meant to be. Problem to be solved, not a source of resources. Game feels way better now. But I cannot really beat a boss I've made myself XD

Another month passed and we are moving forward. It feels really great seeying project improve. We've added some new enemies and we are slowly adding all the missing visuals. We worked on monsters sounds (still few are left) and the game really starting to feel nice. We've reached this place, when I reallt started to like the game, and I kinda enjoy testing it. Biggest issue for now is not enought weapons, traits and characters. And we could use more waves, but we have reached the amount of waves that will be available in the demo, so I guess we're good for now.

Speaking of demo - we have integrated the game with Steam, and Steam page is in preparation. It should be available at the start of September if everything goes as we planned.
Oh, and I have improved the UI, it now have animated background, and colors got a little bit tuned. No more gray boredom. See it for yourself.