Level design progress, gameplay WIPs, and our plans for the future!
Hello everyone!
I’ve had people poke me about writing an update on my little passion project, so here we are.
WHAT IS THIS
Gravemind (working title) is a first-person shooter heavily inspired by Half-Life and early 2000s Source Engine games. The game is currently in its prototyping stage.
We are working on a demo that’s progressing steadily, as some of you might’ve noticed by the tweets we’ve been posting!
These blockouts are courtesy of Jim Brown, who has joined our little ragtag group of starry-eyed optimists in creating levels! I’ve known Jim for over 7 years and worked together with him on Lordbound a LOT during our Skyrim modding era, crafting dungeons and open world experiences.
He has recently finished his work on El Paso, Elsewhere and has been using his time between jobs to whip up this beautiful blockout. We were very glad to see the positive reception on Twitter, as it confirms that we have something appealing going on.
Our goal through this level design is to determine the building blocks we need to capture that Half-Life essence. Ladders? Check. Crawling through vents? Heck yeah. What else do we need to spice things up? Switches? What tools are missing to easily setup scripted events? The layout generated a lot of questions that we hope to answer in the coming months!
Core Gameplay
The past few months have been crazy productive, as we’re currently sketching out the core gameplay experience. The demo level will be our “five minutes of fun,” where we try to nail and sell our game to ourselves and our players.
It’s a fun exploratory phase where nearly everything goes, so I’m savouring the amount of freedom we have right now.
Physics Fun is one of the core pillars of our game, playing a big part in our combat and level design. ‘Finding the fun’ is a common phrase in game development and one we keep repeating as a mantra for Gravemind.
Luckily, rag dolls physics are easy fun in any game.
For the future
Our current goal is to work towards a demo for funding and gameplay footage before launching our Steam Store page.
The big things left to do:
Flesh out gunplay and enemy AI.
Expanding our dialogue system by supporting ambient dialogue.
Do an art pass on our demo level, trying to nail down our Brutalist art direction.
Replace those blue character models with something more aesthetically fitting.
You can expect more progress as we start our art pass on the demo level. I can’t wait to gush about our art inspirations as it’s 90% why we’re making the game.
I would link to a Steam Store page if we had one… but that’s still a work-in-progress. In the meantime, you can subscribe to this newsletter to stay informed!
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