Mech Punk devlog #1

Hi everyone, MrPink's here.

After spending the last few months working on the dog walking rpg game and finding almost no fun in it, I had that impulse in my mind, an urge to quickly make something really fun. I was kinda on the edge about this because impulsive descisions rarely do any good to me. 

So before creating another empty Unity project (which is like the scariest thing for me nowadays), I shared some ideas with a few of my gamedev buddies. I remembered one FPS underwater prototype I made in the last year. Its pacing was too slow for me to come up with any fun gameplay, but I felt like there’s a lot of untapped potential.

And so the idea I settled on was to make the same thing again but this time it should be actually fun. 

I started with the player's movement, as it’s arguably the most important thing in a game like this. I wanted it to be as simple as possible, so the movement script is actually the most default thing you can google up. I just removed clamping camera rotation on the X axis so the player could fly around upside down. 

Then I added two cake guns to shoot cakes. I called it a 360 degrees cake shooting game and posted it on twitter. But twitter people didn’t give a much shit about it. And so I learned that cake shooting isn’t the most viral idea out there.

Pathfinding in Unity is one of my oldest enemies and pathfinding in three dimensions is like a boss of pathfinding. Luckily, I tackled it before and actually implemented the A* based 3d pathfinding once, so I knew it’s all doable… But I decided to steal other people's code anyway.

I youtubed up 3d pathfinding system by A Bit Of Game Dev. The system creates a 3D grid of cells and raycasts against obstacles to mark each cell either empty or blocked. A* then runs through the grid and finds the best path between two points. Also A Bit Of Game Dev added that cool looking path smoothing which my system didn’t have, so thank you dude.

So I implemented his solution, added some enemies and shiish… At the end of day one the game was already at least as fun as GOLDENDENDOLA rest in peace (january 2022 april 2022). I showed the game’s footage to my other game dev buddy and he was like “remove ⅔ of all cubes, add Vampire Survivors progression and release it tomorrow” and I was like OK.

One of the most important things in Vampire Survivors is your exp bar. It’s basically the main feedback on how you’re progressing. So I added the exp bar. Enemies drop exp pick ups and you choose one of few rewards when you level up. You can get a new weapon, or upgrade an old one, or get some passive stat boosts or perks. 

I wanted to add some more elements of player’s customization and, well… Just let players stick guns to the mech on their own where they want them to be. I’m certainly not good at placing weapons on screen. So, in theory, if a player puts a gun in a bad position where he can’t see forward, he will blame himself instead of me hehehe. 

The idea sounds cool but I wonder how the actual gameplay could change based on your weapons positioning. There’s something definitely there, but I’m not sure what exactly. Maybe weapons placed together should synergy somehow for something good or bad to happen? At the very least I can just restrict weapons placement a bit to bring it that Resident Evil inventory tetris game vibes.

Finally I added coin drops which you can use to buy new stuff that you can get in the run. Later I’ll add some new levels to unlock and even some story beats.

Overall, I’m very happy with MECH PUNK right now. The music is a placeholder for now, but my buddy Josh Lim is making some original tracks for the game. He also made some cool music for Golden Light, so definitely check him out. https://www.joshjameslim.com/

Also jump to our Discord server where me and some other devs share builds, feedback and suggestions. If you’re small gamedev, you’ll definitely find some folks to show your game to. Being just a guy who wants to talk things with other people works too https://discord.gg/5KjNyDH

see ya