Greetings. My first dev diary! Where to begin?

Overthinking

This isn’t a reverse boast, but I tend to overthink. The name of the game: it started as Video Game Man moved on to Play Through History took a detour to Spawn Arcade and finally settled on Five Arcade. My company name went through a similar process. It was very unproductive. So I decided just to pick names which were at least a little relevant and sounded nice enough: so Five Arcade (it’s set in an arcade and the main characters are Fi and Ve [which was definitely planned the whole time and not wrenched in…definitely, probably] and Lone Room Games [I make games alone in a room, subtle]. I hope these names can become something semi-meaningful after the fact. Time will tell. It’s been a month or so since I settled on the names and they don’t annoy me yet so that’s good.

Progress Check-In

What state is the game in? It works and the basic mechanics are in.

Game Mechanics

I have one guiding principle for this game: Everything is built around the two guns Vi holds. Each gun is controlled with an analogue stick. Aim and shoot. If you shoot backwards with the pistol Vi will move forward. I have the game coded using fancy design patterns which I’m so excited to share, but I’ll leave that for a future diary, maybe when I’ve got all this admin stuff out of the way. The customization of each gun type is the absolute foundation of this game and what I’m most proud of.

It’s always fun when playing games (indie games especially) and you find little references to other games. It’s gives a strong sense of community which always makes me smile. I wanted to do something similar, but make gameplay references. So any game I make a cheeky reference to, there will be a reason expressed in gameplay for the inclusion. It’s hard to explain without it just sounding like I’m stealing from other games, but I promise I’m not and hopefully you’ll see what I mean soon.

Familiar Variety

There are different physics in the game. Space sections have no gravity for example. So you’ll be floating around, walking around, falling around, and some other weirder things. Throughout all of these sections I wanted to ensure the gameplay remained familiar even if it’s slightly tweaked. This coupled with the different gun types and effects could be disorienting but I hope I’ve kept a consistency which keeps players engaged and not constantly on the back foot.

What I’m Working On Now?

I’m in the process of setting up this very website. I want to keep it basic but I will be upgrading it as time passes, so please bare with me. I’m also waiting for Steam to approve my identity so I can get a Coming Soon page uploaded. Making a coming soon page was a strange process, one I will be writing about soon. I panic. About everything. So when Steam informed me I may not be a real person, even I questioned my humanity. But I sent in my ID and hopefully they will confirm my existence then I can proceed to upload all these images and descriptions I have spent a few weeks making

Here is a little look at the main capsule image that will hopefully be on Steam soon…

Future Plans

Thanks for reading. It’s been very nice writing this small diary. I can’t wait to go into more detail about the specifics of the games code, music, writing and art. I wanted to keep this first one quite small as there is so much to talk about and if I keep writing I’ll end up with a giant, and likely boring, article. It also gives me so many things I can talk about every week. I hope at least some of what to come will be enjoyable or enlightening or educational. I’ve got quite a lot of admin stuff to take care of, including publishing this website. So I’m going to go and get it done.

Bye for now.