Great Gun Gauntlet 
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Oooh! Shiny! - GGG Dev Log #10Apr 20, 2024 - Community AnnouncementsI can't deny, it hasn't been as productive of a first month since launch as I'd like. Early Spring + some life stuff keeping me busy for a bit and whoops the time flies by in a way that makes me baffled a month has already passed. But besides life, the two major things that hit recently was a mix of burnout after rushing to hit my own deadline, and decision paralysis. I really had to tie myself to the ground and stop chasing each shiny different feature I wanted to work on all at once now that I'm free from deadline-necessary features. Oooh gauntlets! Oooh new players! Oooh polish! Bug fixes! Updating UI! More arenas! Finishing the proper roadmap! Better tutorials! Ooh shiny oooh shiiiny! Aaaaaand you leave yourself doing none of it because you want to do all of it. Luckily I think I've gotten ahold of myself and progress is starting to inch along faster again. Of course, I don't want this to just be some "woe is me" post about "my dream job too hard :(", so let's talk about what we HAVE managed to do in the last month! Starting with something more exciting, I've decided to completely rework the level select screen to have the much needed cool factor it was lacking. Also to help it scale well with possible changes to what content is planned, but that's news for another day. I've occasionally mentioned a so called "Mission Mode" idea as possible extra side content later into development, but recently I realized it was a bit silly to come up with this UI design for side content when I could use it to bless the main content with well needed vibes. So now Survival Mode and Mission Mode will be in the same level select screen! If/when we finally think to add some Missions, they'll be added as a different shaped peg on the grid with a somewhat different unlock format. The screen feels a little empty for now, but trust me, I've got big plans for it! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/42716007/572c5076e5d5d9af68edf5c0027aefe38b1d55bf.png On a less visually exciting bit of news, we've also been working with the controls a bit more since launch. We've gotten just enough feedback to realize we need to put more effort into the keyboard and mouse controls, like... a lot more effort. Unfortunately most people try playing with WASD and/or Mouse and... yowch, admittedly we added those more just so people would have them, we highly underestimated just how much the PC market doesn't use controller and it seems most people were putting the game down without knowing how much better that control method feels. The game will always be night and day with the quality of using a gamepad vs using mouse or keyboard, it was built for controller from the get-go, but we really want to try to polish the alternate controls as best as we can just in hopes the game can play okay without a controller. I might add more indicators in the game to recommend controller as it boots up, like seriously I can't stress enough how much better it feels with thumbsticks. It makes me realize GGG is probably mor...So, what's next? - GGG Dev Log #9Mar 17, 2024 - Community AnnouncementsWe've finally ripped the bandaid off by committing to the recent release date, a somewhat arbitrary goal to hit but one that felt important of else I'd find excuses to just keep avoiding releasing the game at all. Get the baseline features in place and feeling decent, then release to Early Access when the majority of the rest of development would be adding content, a simple plan and now we just have to pull off the "add content" part. Of course, along the way we've also hit a lot of "I'd like to add this" or "I'd like to polish that" or "This feature isn't cool enough", so there's definitely a bit of polish left to do as well. The first major content update will probably actually take a bit of time, as recently I realized I wasn't satisfied with the Survival Mode menu, it seemed a bit bland and uninspired and it dawned on me that this "Mission Mode" idea we had occasionally mentioned has no reason to be a separate mode. So we will likely be spending some time working on the new fancier level select screen that will act as a hub combining the various modes into one in the future. The new level select is probably the most major "wasn't in the original plan" change the game will have, but most of the idea is just to add a layer of needed "cool factor" to progression that the game doesn't currently have. It's an additive change, so don't worry about getting less content. We'll have a more detailed dev log for this later, when it is closer to done. In the mean time, we'll likely continue putting out smaller bug fix/polish updates until that content update is ready, notably there's a few known issues with the music system and the gauntlet generator that we'd like to shift as priority issues to fix soon. As for the actual main content of the game to add (gauntlets, arenas, and characters), updates will include additions of these in the order they are meant to be unlocked. We will probably work on them somewhat out of order, but they'll only go public at the right time. This'll likely causes down periods where not much content comes out, and then larger bulk updates as we hit chunks of finished content. The actual order of levels is already decided, you can probably expect a new arena coming out if there is a long delay between updates or something. The somewhat silly result of pre-planning the content like this is that after just 1 more gauntlet we'll be forced to make the next arena before we can share the next one after that. And 3 more gauntlets before the next player character. At some point I'll update the Roadmap page to be cleaned up and include better info now that the full picture of the project is becoming truly clear. More places you can keep up with development: Website Blog Discord Server Bluesky AccountGGG Change Log v0.7.0 - Early Access Launch Update!Mar 15, 2024 - Community AnnouncementsGame is out now on Steam Early Access! Buy it within a week of March 15th to get it an extra 10% off! While we kept the demo decently up to date with QoL features as we worked towards release, now we move forward with our first release version! v0.7 brings some rebalance to existing gauntlets and 2 new ones. Two more play modes as well for those who are truly sadistic, One Hit and One Life mode if the game wasn't spicy enough for you. Also another important change is the addition of a level unlocking system, giving a taste for how progress will feel as we add content to the game. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/42716007/369c3c5823bc995d156d35b95f17163607e4e086.png v0.7.0 - Removed Demo menus, replaced with regular menus. - Rebalanced Startup Program to be better as a first level. - Rebalanced Gun Gauntlet. - Added new Gauntlet, No Gun Zone. - Added new Gauntlet, Mega Mix. - Added new gameplay music track. - Added new boss music track. - Added One Hit Mode. - Added One Life Mode. - Adjusted Player Shield size. - Adjusted Plasma Spinner collider size. - Enabled game progression/level unlocking. - Fixed issue where certain sounds wouldn't play. Don't forget there's a few other places you can follow us for updates: Website Blog Discord Server Bluesky AccountDemo Change Log v0.6.99999999Mar 3, 2024 - Community AnnouncementsWhile working on the upcoming release, we've been adding some quality of life improvements that seem worth it to upload to the demo as well. This includes something we didn't have ready in time previously, the controller config menu: {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/42716007/7db387e769b58847efc67d8098656ba58669b0eb.png I still don't consider controller the ideal way to play a game like this, but we'll continue to try to add features to make it at least reasonable over time. Also for those that find the game a bit touchy, we also added a few sensitivity sliders for thumbstick controls: {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/42716007/a5c0a71708b902bbf741efc60fa0c63e839af580.png One last notable change we're trying in this version is we've made it so bullets now render in front of other objects, due to the top-down nature of the game we can get away with this without any notable problems from the looks of it, so it should help a lot with clarity: {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/42716007/843979a22fb068bebb29b813a6c234c1d3554aeb.png Full changelog for v0.6.99999999: - Subtly tightened controls. - Added movement sensitivity sliders. - Subtle screen effect tweaks. - Experimental improvement to bullet visibility. - Trying out a rebalance of Heavy and Light Turrets. - Adjusted Laser hitboxes to be slightly more lenient. - Added keyboard config menu. - Fixed some small UI navigation issues. - Fixed bug with config not resetting correctly. - Fixed some small issues with boss hitboxes. - Fixed bug allowing player to boost during pause & menus. - Fixed bug causing a certain combination of inputs/menuing to restart current run. - Fixed bug causing bullets to spawn out of bounds.Great Gun Gauntlet Q&A + Demo GameplayFeb 6, 2024 - Community AnnouncementsWe're back again this Saturday, between 5PM and 9PM EST, with another session of Q&A while playing the demo. Hopefully this stream goes a little smoother than the last one.Steam Next Fest Q&A + Demo Gameplay StreamFeb 4, 2024 - Community AnnouncementsWe're doing a Q&A stream between 5PM and 9PM EST this Monday (and likely another on Saturday), come by to watch some gameplay or talk to the developers.Demo Change Log v0.6.9999999Feb 1, 2024 - Community AnnouncementsSquashing a few bugs and improving a handful of things to get the demo just a little bit more polished before Next Fest. Wishlist and Feedback buttons now take you to the Steam app instead of web pages (who even logs into steam on their browser?), and now the Settings menu saves changes. v0.6.9999999 - Added basic Steam Overlay integration. - Misc tiny optimizations. - Added ChangeLog file. - Slight UI improvements. - Settings now save and load properly. - Added system for better upgrading Config files during development. - Fixed bug with Spinning Laser Audio AGAIN. - Fixed bug causing boss to shake screen extra. - Fixed bug causing objects to appear during main menu. (Yes I'm doubling down on these version numbers for the demo, you can't stop me.)What Even Is "Party Mode"? - GGG Dev Log #8Jan 30, 2024 - Community AnnouncementsThis was a Dev Log from our blog we meant to post here weeks ago, oops! Just an odd little set of thoughts about an idea we had mentioned earlier in development, specifically the question of what even is this thing we have been calling "Party Mode"? Honestly, its probably not what that name makes people think and I'm trying to think of a better term. Party Mode tends to imply multiplayer/group activity, and if there's any of that included in the mode it'd still only be a small part of it. Sandbox Mode? Extras? Toybox? Basically it's just the place where we can put the "everything else" of the content. This is very much the "no promises" section on top of how much of the content already isn't guaranteed. A first person mode? Put it in there. Customizable challenge modes? Put them in there. Some kind of multiplayer support? Put it in there. Twitch/Streaming integration? Seems like a good place for it. You can get a bit of a picture of what the intention was for it, just a sub-menu for different wacky stuff that comes to mind. Likely nothing tied to high scores or leaderboards, so easier to add and manage both the data and expectations for. The main oddity for it at this point is entirely how long we feel like continuing to develop using the Unity engine, the recent issues really kicked our motivation to spend time practicing Unity-specific features like their networking options, so there may be some limits to how much extra stuff we feel like developing. "When I try to rewrite old clunky code into the more formal more official way they want us to do it and it turns out more clunky than it was before, we have a problem" - Recent quote from Kyle during one of our development meetings. As time goes on our skills improve, but the development debt of how Unity itself seems to be built increasingly shows itself to us. At some point we have to decide when it is more worth it to just move onto a new game. And considering how long developing all the main content may take, maybe we'll feel the game has plenty after working on it for 2-3 more years. We'll see how it goes, to an extent this might just be us spouting ideas far too early before there's a concrete idea of how they'll be realized. That's about as simple as the situation is. tl;dr - Eeeeh yeah we'll probably just call it "Extras" on the menu if we add any of this stuff.Great Gun Gauntlet, coming to Steam Next Fest!Jan 22, 2024 - Community AnnouncementsWe seem to be all set with our demo ready just in time for the upcoming Steam Next Fest! Give it a try February 5th to get a taste for the game before launch! We will likely keep the demo up after the event as well, for those unsure about jumping in on an Early Access title trying a demo is a great way to hook you in figure out if the experience is something you want to play more of immediately or wait until it's finished. The demo will have the first two gauntlets in the first arena, a fraction of the content we want to add to the full game but a good preview of how the main mechanics feel playing as Gear Guy. Besides the demo coming out, we will also be announcing the official release date for Early Access soon. We've already mentioned March as the goal, and as we close in on that it becomes more and more realistic! Stay tuned, these will be an exciting two months for us! Don't forget we also have a Discord server if you want to stay up to date or ask questions.Visual Clarity VS Pretty Graphics - GGG Dev Log #7Nov 22, 2023 - Community AnnouncementsVisual clarity is incredibly important when designing any high intensity game like this, you want the player to be able to quickly read the room and understand what they are up against and how to deal with it. If you are building your visual design entirely focused on visual clarity, you are going to have a good time making your game readable... but if you are like me, then you are also stubborn... you want your game to also have that nice high fidelity look to it and in the process have made striking the balance between your game looking nice and playing well a lot harder. If you are like me, you have also made the mistake of making a game built around an incredibly busy visual style involving conveyors and hundreds of objects on screen. Oh boy. Today I'll be going over some ways I've tried to strike a balance between the graphics and the clarity. This is not the type of game where I want things to sneak up on the player, every moment of the game should feel like they can process what they see and make a next move. I may also go over some ways I'd like to further improve the game's clarity in the future. A good place to start is color selection, for the most part we follow the common practice of making blues and greens relate to the "safe" objects, while reds and purples mean "unsafe". {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/42716007/f222982621669c5b79286ffa276bb0490c7b920f.png I tried to make this color coding consistent throughout everything, along with some other visual themes such as dangerous objects generally having a harsher/sharper look to them. This is yet another place where we can point out improvements made since the demo, as some of the dangerous objects from the demo didn't quite follow this color coding. Examples include both the bullet and plasma obstacles having distinctly blue tones mixed into their color patterns, and probably most notably the electric gates used a soft blue compared to their current red look. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/42716007/bfbc09e0fc96897382ec7c093c55f73de1acfcb0.png Besides that, in general I feel like the red colors of the obstacles are far more notable than before, making them stand out in the arena better even when Dark Mode is enabled. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/42716007/0281ebfa8df98ce94adfd6088c85df36920b7ed9.png Speaking of the lighting effects, that's where a huge amount of the debate in my head between visual fidelity and clarity comes from. The majority of the assets in the game end up being metal-based, so even with a lot of fine tuning to make everything look good and decently diverse in how it reflects light, there's still a layer of trying to ensure the core gameplay elements of the obstacles vs the conveyors stand out between each other. Even now, if it turns out I haven't made a decent enough compromise in this regard I may find myself going back and adjusting the conveyor visuals more, I think the boxes and turrets and especially the plasma obstacles all stand out decently, but they also all notably reflect back the enviro...Taking Aim At A Release Window - GGG Dev Log #6Nov 16, 2023 - Community AnnouncementsLooks like we did that thing again where we don't post much progress for some months, oops. Ah well, I'll start queuing up some stuff now that we're trying to target an actual release date soon. Cutting to the chase, we're looking at March of 2024 for the first version of Early Access, that should time well with being able to get a demo out for Steam Next Fest along with having all the backbone stuff finished that we've been stuck on for a while. Exact date to be announced. Don't forget to wishlist the game! The main holdup right now is wanting to make sure the reworked UI does everything it should, and that the save files/config files work well. UI stuff doesn't come natural to us it seems, and even the state of the first version will likely be very unpolished, but so long as we can get that to a minimum level of quality we can feel at least somewhat safe to focus down the release window. Besides that, I'm becoming more confident everything is getting to a point where post-initial-release I'll be able to output regular content updates, so in the mean time I just need to make sure the initial content feels good for that first release. Meanwhile the one problem child of development right now is music, still do not have the money to hire someone, and still don't have an ounce of talent, so it is the one aspect of the game I worry about. Ideally one day we might have the money to hire someone, until then I just hope what I've managed to scrape together can satisfy. Let's see, what else can I talk about? Oh yeah, part of the weirdness is the odd transition social media is in right now. Some services are failing, others need a bit of effort to start accessing, some we don't feel like supporting... This combination unfortunately leaves us a bit lost as to handle our social media presence going forward, so we'll try to figure that out soon. For now our new Discord server works as a decent hub for news and conversation, at least for those that use the service. Also, obviously this release window is the plan, but there's always a chance the plan will fall through (a theme is starting to form in this regard). Like, even this announcement was meant to come out back in October, but a family visit, a burned hand, and a cold later and October was not my month... Time keeps on ticking, but sometimes development doesn't. Let's try to fix that.The Fancy New Particles - Dev Log #5Jan 19, 2023 - Community AnnouncementsStrap in folks, this one's a doozy. Today I'd like to talk about a feature I was stubborn about adding despite it perhaps maybe not being the most efficient use of our time; the cool new visual effects we worked on that allows broken obstacle pieces to be properly carried away by the conveyors rather than just sit there in an immersion-breaking way. I'm actually also going to be putting this in the Dev Sandbox category of the blog, because I feel like getting quite technical. I also don't recommend reading this post if seeing back-end game development clips might take you out of the immersion/experience? Might also just be boring. Don't take this as best-practice advice. It's just my experiences solving some weird problems. To properly get started, this is the stuff I'm talking about: The way objects break into many little pieces that then get carried down the conveyor. For context, in the original demo objects just poofed into smoke and only a couple large pieces (mostly from the player dying) would bounce around the arena; but those pieces would just land on conveyors and sit there unmoving in a way that makes you go "yep, it's a videogame". I imagine people with experience trying to optimize advanced particle effects are already seeing this and going "oh no", while those without much experience with game engines might be thinking "what's the big deal?", and highly experienced developers are probably also going "what's the big deal?". I definitely don't fall into the category of "highly experienced" so... The big deal, as the "oh no" crowd might have guessed, is that 90% of this ordeal was all about figuring out how to optimize something like this to not destroy performance. I'm convinced just about anyone could figure out how to make this work, but making it work efficiently is a whole other story. This may not be a big open world game with complex systems, but it still has important optimization challenges when you need hundreds of dynamic things to be on screen at the same time without impacting performance for a wide audience of players. Getting started let's first look at the point where particles like this are born. The process for creating the cracked pieces is the "lazy" way that doesn't actually dynamically slice the object. Doing that would have been an unnecessary level of wasted processing time, and curating the chunky pieces allows for slightly more interesting visuals on the inside and in what ways they are split up. I make these in Blender like all the other models. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/42716007/4aa41fb87dad17e1514210a662f9cbe8c2a918ea.png This would be a good time to note the game engine being used is Unity, for some this may add to that "oh no" factor of the challenge ahead, but otherwise it is good context to know that the shenanigans involved are quite unique to the engine's tools and working with its limitations. The next step is another simple one, import the model and start setting these up as the mesh visuals for a standard...Graphical Improvements - Dev Log #4Jan 5, 2023 - Community AnnouncementsRecently we've been posting a series of comparison clips between many of the older designs from early development and how they look now. Unfortunately we've found neither our blog nor here has a good format for compiling them in one place, so instead we made a dedicated page on our website for them. You can go here to see the full page of graphical comparison clips. Here's a few highlights anyway though, despite this not being the best format to show them in. First we have the original Turret and Player models getting their graphical upgrades. And also a bright/dark comparison to really show off how nice the new emission textures are being put to use. Yes there is a setting in-game to turn off the lights and play in the dark. And of course the main arena's graphical upgrade. I'm really proud of how this came out, it might not seem like that much compared to some of the other graphics, but if you were to go back and play the original demo and then come back to the current version it'd be incredibly clear just how much better the atmosphere is now. Also of course the UI is way better too. One other comparison that's interesting to make is the upgrade to the player model. This is such a nice showcase of skill improvement because while it looks so much more detailed with more properly modeled geometry and details like the gems actually poking out instead of being textures... it's actually slightly lower polygon count! The original wasted an insane amount of polygons on the arm spheres, so optimizing the topology of those in the new model lowered it from 2,662 polygons to 2,592. Never underestimate how wasteful poorly optimized spheres can be. Also bonus fact: the new model's face can change expression, which is neat. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/42716007/002c4604617f735f60a11878d8a6de0b07d3b7c7.png For now this is all the comparisons we've made to the older assets, if in the future we post more screenshots or videos, the dedicated page will be updated to include them. That's all for now, if you would like to keep up to date with news and announcements consider checking out our various Social Media accounts or the News page of our website.Score Combos - Dev Log #3Dec 15, 2022 - Community AnnouncementsAnother recent improvement to the gameloop has been the addition of a combo system to the way the player scores points. Originally each object simply rewarded a set number of points when destroyed, but now so long as you keep scoring points every second you will receive an increasing amount as your combo increases! A bonus new feature to mention that goes along with this, different obstacles have different amounts of health now, and may take multiple hits to destroy. This doesn't however mean higher health obstacles will ruin your combo, doing damage at all rewards you a small amount of points and keeps your combo fresh! This system isn't just for the benefit of your high scores and adding meta to the community score competition, but also ties into how progress works in this game. Progression towards beating a gauntlet/increasing its difficulty is advanced entirely by score, so if you'd like to win in a reasonable amount of time then playing well and keeping that combo going is in your interest! That's all for now, if you would like to keep up to date with news and announcements consider checking out our various Social Media accounts or the News page of our website.Fancier Obstacle Spawning - Dev Log #2Dec 1, 2022 - Community AnnouncementsWelcome back, for our second dev log we'll be talking about improvements made to the obstacle spawning system, like most features it has improved a lot since the original demo. The spawning system is another core system and like the conveyors talked about in our previous dev log the quality of this system decides just how interestingly we can design the game. In the original demo all this system could do was decide which obstacles were created and how many were being created per second, the obstacles were always randomly placed with only a few rules in the logic such as Lasers or Spinners only being able to be placed on center lanes. In the current version we have full control over which lanes on each conveyor each object is allowed to be placed on, this is a massive step up as it allows us to do very interesting positioning and themed patterns in the gauntlets. A lot of dev time will go into coming up with many many ideas for how to utilize it, especially when coupled with the conveyor improvements in the last dev log. Variety is the spice of a game like this, and we've found our peppers. We have a few video examples, such as this one where we split them up by conveyor: Another useful spawning feature that can be coupled with this is control over which directions lasers can point when created, opens up possibilities with specific risk-reward patterns. But that's not all, we also have a feature for immediately creating obstacles in an exact lane position, giving us a nice amount of control for more curated pattern designs. This feature will likely be used a lot for Missions due to the more curated nature of those. Below is a demonstration that pushes the limits of this feature, running 60 of them in a row. While there's no guarantee, ideally when development of this game is nearing completion I'd love to figure out a way to give players a way to design their own custom Gauntlets. I can already see the absolutely wild challenges people could design with access to an in-game version of the same tools I use to make these... I can also already see the meme-printing, but that's partially because that's one of the first ways I tested the above feature... That's all for now, if you would like to keep up to date with news and announcements consider checking out our various Social Media accounts or the News page of our website.Fancier Conveyors - Dev Log #1Nov 24, 2022 - Community AnnouncementsHey there, welcome to the first dev log for Great Gun Gauntlet! I'm hoping these are nice and informative and help keep people up to date with everything we're working on as development continues. For these first few we will be talking about changes from our old Alpha Demo. Starting with a relatively simple yet fundamental feature of the game, let's talk about Conveyors! First, a quick overview of their role in the game: In Great Gun Gauntlet obstacles are brought into the arena via the conveyors, this makes the conveyors fundamental to the appearance of obstacles and their positioning in the arena; some obstacles are only threatening to the player because of what the conveyors are doing as they move them around. In the Alpha Demo conveyors were very stiff, three conveyors with directions Right, Left, Right or vise versa if the speeds were reversed. >>
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