QueztalQuest (working title)
A personal project that I started in early 2018 and now intend to polish up and eventually publish. The game is a twin-stick shooter set in the early 1900s in the Mayan ruins of Central America. The adventurer(s) fight off hordes of reanimated mummies and similar supernatural enemies using a variety of weapons and abilities. Wave-based survival is currently the only mode available, but I am working on adding a full campaign.
All development of this game was done by me using the Unity Game Engine, including artwork, game design, programming, and several of the sound effects.
The production of this game started as a simple experiment to try and produce a playable game in as short amount of time as possible. My friends and I had been replaying the same game over and over and were starting to get bored and so I took it upon myself to try and produce a quick, fun game for us to play instead, with the added bonus of being able to tweak and improve it continually as we played it more.
There were several conditions; first and foremost I needed it to be multiplayer, at least locally.
Secondly, I wanted it to be a shooter, preferably wave-based and arcade-like as that was the style of gameplay my friends enjoyed and would also allow for shorter game sessions making it less of a 'commitment'.
I had begun working on a mayan outdoor scene recently and figured that it would make a good arena for this type of game, and so the project began.
The Map
The map is the ruins of an outdoor Mayan temple complex hidden deep in the jungle, with various small buildings and levels of elevation that break up the large empty space. The initial intent was to have large areas populated with smaller obstacles and obstructions that would give the illusion of open space, whereas the gameplay would soon feel claustrophobic and stressful as the player was funneled through tight corridors or bridges, or cornered by the hordes of enemies approaching. This style of gameplay is still a goal, though the map is not yet as populated as planned.
After the work was done and the game was playable, I was finally in the stages of improvement and iteration rather than core-development, and one of the first things I began improving was the texture work. I am not really a 2D artist, though I have been developing my skills in Substance Painter and Photoshop. During the later stages of initial development, I created a twitter account and began browsing through indie game dev content, finding image after image of beautiful game design. Looking at these and back to my own game, one of the biggest things to jump out was the difference in textures. My game had an overall red/brown ambience and something about the quality of the textures just felt... wrong, inconsistent. What always caught my eye with these other games was the simple, often hand-painted environments that provided so much of the atmosphere just from a screenshot. So I began overhauling the environment. Overly-complex, gritty textures were replaced by my own attempt at hand-painted simple artwork. I am still very much in progress with this texture update, but I instantly feel better about the overall look.
Below is a comparison of the same asset with the original textures and the new hand-painted ones.
As you can see, the new textures are softer, simpler, and far more consistent between models than the originals. These texture updates are far from over and so the screenshots on this page will likely have a mix of the new and old textures in some scenes, as it is still a work in progress.
The Characters
There are currently two playable characters in the game differing only in their appearance, though I intend to add different load-outs or abilities to separate them a little more. The Adventurer, styled with a white shirt and green cargo trousers, leather braces and gun strap, and a leather fedora; and the The Pilot, wearing a white, short-sleeved shirt, a dark gray sleeveless jacket, tan cargo trousers, and plaited hair.
The enemies take the form of supernatural beings fighting off the intruders with furious loyalty. There are at present, two forms of enemies.
Mummies: bandaged, rotting corpses of those who once inhabited what is now just crumbling stone. They are slow and do not inflict much damage, but they are numerous and can easily overwhelm the player if not taken care of.
Statues: large, humanoid stone sculptures with jaguar-like heads. These are substantially harder to kill than the mummies and do far more damage, but are slower and telegraph their attacks. They pound the ground and damage anything too close, which can be a benefit to the player if other enemies happen to get caught in the attack.
More enemies are in the works, and a boss character is also on the way.
The Gameplay
The game is currently only a wave-based survival, though there are plans to add progression and a story once the more important improvements/additions have taken place. The player(s) explore the area whilst being hunted by waves of an increasing number of mummies, living statues, and various other supernatural enemies. The player is given a revolver with unlimited ammunition to start the game with but may find additional weapons that spawn on the map. These weapons each have a cost and the player may only purchase them if they have an appropriate amount of gold coins which are dropped by vanquished enemies. Each weapon pickup has a limited amount of ammo and once depleted, the player will automatically drop the weapon and revert back to their default - the revolver.
The waves are endless, though the total enemies spawned per wave will eventually reach a maximum that the following waves will not be able to exceed. Once all players are dead, the game will end and the player(s) will be taken back to the main menu, where they will see their total saved gold. This number is the cumulative amount of gold coins that the player has picked up, regardless of whether or not it was spent, throughout the game. This data is saved locally to their machine, and so will continue to increase after each game.
The gold they have earned can be used in the shop to purchase additional playable characters, game-modes, starter-weapons, and maps; however this additional content is not yet added.