Hey everyone,
State Licentia is a time-warping, side-scrolling adventure game exploring the aftermath of a war under a totalitarian rule.
Players are to uncover a mystery whilst on constant raids, exploring a decaying civilisation inside and outside of the city walls. Players can talk and negotiate with citizens of Licentia, as well as buying new equipment. Combat consists of side-scrolling shooting segments similar to Deadbolt.
Background
Following the end of a war, the State of Licentia moves inside of its walls, leaving no man’s land rotting outside. The people produce the first biologically enhanced human - finding means to recover the lost land, where the forgotten gods lay in slumber.
Goals
I’ve never made a linear, narrative based game before, and want to challenge myself with creating a story as well as making a fun experience. This is my first major project, and I am on solo development using Game Maker Studio.
Schedule
I plan to post every month where there has been enough progress to talk about.
This post highlights progress during the first few weeks of development.
The game first looked like this;
This was a mockup, and I ran with the colour palette. A few days later I had basic combat working;
Combat was very heavily timed with you taking cover and returning fire. The player could take cover and roll, and from that I decided to make the enemies do that as well.
So far enemies will take nearby cover when alerted, and can reload and return fire, just like the player. I’ve never done any complex AI trees so it would be a challenge for me to add smarter and seemingly organic enemies.
You can also use a melee attack on enemies, which is quite useful for enemies that keep sticking behind cover. I might implement some enemies that can only be defeated using melee hits.
I plan to finish the basic combat mechanics before moving on to building the story and game world.
Besides the combat segments I’ve worked on the bare bones ‘exploration’ segments;
Text-boxes! (yay)
I plan to divide the game up into separate segments were the player can talk to and explore the area. Various Npcs can act as merchants, or give clues. The text-boxes now are pretty standard, although I plan to add some text effects to make reading a bit less mind-numbing.
You can follow development on twitter, where I post everything as I work on them!
@uInkMachine
That's it for now, keep an eye on this thread for future updates. See you next month!