Nexus Game Studio – Independent Game Developer

Developer Diary 12: Infinite Reboot

Today we have some major topics to discuss about what happened with Infinite and what’s going to happen. Last month, we did a review of the entire game and how we felt about its fundamental gameplay mechanics, style, direction, and personal enjoyment of the game. We came to the harsh realization about Infinite, the game did not meet our quality of standards and completely veered off our original vision. We were just finishing off the tutorial in game so we could have a build ready to send to our testers. During this, we noticed how overly complex the game became. We’ve had a rough time during it’s development, we never pin-pointed a specific genre and features felt tacked on. This hurt the game since we overwhelmed it with mechanics that took several procedures to operate, slow paced gameplay, and a general lack of fun. All these issues with the game made us really start loosing the passion to work on the project and started having the “just get it done” mentality.  Now we know we had some serious issues.

So, what did we decide to do? We knew the game was not good, no point in trying to save it. We scrapped most of the game, months of work, thousands of lines of code and refocused on creating the new gameplay, something that retained our original vision of creating star systems; pick-up and play, unique, replay value, and most importantly, fun!

With these in mind, we ended up reverting and modifying an old original concept back in our prototyping days, funny how that came full circle. Thanks to the lessons we have learned from making the scrapped version and clocking in many, many hours, we were able to quickly code up a new playable build in about a week, all clean code and far more efficient.

So without further adieu, here is a screenshot of the new version of Infinite.

Keep in mind, the game, nor visual style is finalized yet, but is a close representation of the final game. We’ve trimmed off quite a bit of fat from the previous version, we still retain orbiting gameplay, however with no more orbit rings, health systems, resource management, unit building / upgrading, etc. to worry about, instead you have a single orbiter in which you collect matter and avoid anti-matter (both not shown), the more matter you collect, a larger planet you build. Simple, “touch anywhere” control of the orbiter and simply touching it creates the planet if you had collected matter, the planet then starts orbiting the star. Your ultimate goal is points, you gain points by collecting matter, but by building planets, not only does it add a multiplier to your score, but also adds time to the clock. There is a bunch more to the game but this is a very brief rundown of the basic gameplay.

Not only now are we excited to be working on the project again, the gameplay is very much a huge leap compared to the old game, much faster paced, and more fun. We decided to aim towards an arcade style, points based game and we think these mechanics blend very well with the genre. We also have retained our other goal; infinite gameplay, no need for separate levels, dynamic loading system adds new level elements to the game. Simple put, what you see above is the only “mode” or “level” but we dynamically add new content to the level on the fly, all seamless. The only end to the game is when you run out of time or exit.

So as you can see, we’ve been through quite a bit! We are making absolute stellar progress on this title and we hope we can have it ready soon. We appreciate your patience, the end result will be much worth it! If you would like to learn more about our game development, follow us on Twitter and Facebook to get the latest information.

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