Thanks for your patience in waiting for the devblog, there’s been a huge amount of discussion over the past couple of weeks and it’s been our primary focus. We do have some visual stuff to share but this post will be talking a bit more about our aims and what we have been discussing. Let’s get started!
So, What Is This Big Discussion?
We have always wanted Labyrinthine to be a quality product, one that really gives us a kick start in the industry and puts our name on the map. That stance has been a constant highlight for us during development. We want to make a game that we ourselves would love to play, after all we are huge horror fans!
It’s become more evident recently that to fulfil our initial plans for a huge sprawling maze split into various sections with different themes and monsters will either require a lot of developers and/or a lot of time. While we could certainly commit to that, the trade-off would be a higher game price, loss of quality or a long development time (or a combination of all 3).
All of these are high-risk to us as an indie studio. We don’t want to risk people losing interest, forgetting about the project or even losing team members due to a lengthy development. We don’t want to deliver a sub-par quality game that feels hollow or rushed; All of the developers here are passionate for this project, and we want that to be seen in the final product. We also don’t want to be releasing at a price that would exclude people who might not be able to afford spending $30+ on new titles.
A Little More About The Price
It’s not really been a topic we’ve mentioned yet, and we feel we should give people an idea of what we’re aiming for. We have consistently aspired towards making the release price a fair one. We want everyone to experience the world of labyrinthine and all of the scares and laughs that come with it. We don’t have any corporate sponsors or devious publishers looking to maximise profits, we are just looking to recouperate the development costs and make a little extra for future projects while delivering a worthy, fun and memorable game.
We Get It, It's Not A Cash Grab
So to bring the above points to a head, we’ve decided to go down the route of quality over quantity. We have scaled back the overall story of Labyrinthine to now be a section of maze with a single theme that we can really spend a lot of time making look beautiful and exciting. We want to really immerse the players into the game world and without the aforementioned manpower, time and copious amounts of money, we feel that aiming for that initial vision of a multi-section, multi themed sprawling expanse of maze may affect our overall delivery on either release time or quality.
If you’re worried this is a bad sign, don’t be! If anything, this change has had a huge positive impact across the team and we are all much happier with it. The majority of content has been created for this initial themed area and other bits may find their way in. The Maze size will also still be a decent size and without having to worry about building up transitions and completely new props, we can spend more time focusing on creating a much more thematic world.
A good portion of our discussions over the past week have been on how we can spice up the aesthetics with plenty of variation and bring a much more refined experience, so once again, the changes are nothing but positive from our end!
But Will We See Those Areas At All? I Saw Something About X On The Discord...
We have spoke a couple of times in discord (join below if you haven’t!) about some of the other planned sections in the maze. We absolutely want to see these come to life at some point and our story already accomodates those areas existing separately. We have planned for future sequels to Labyrinthine which will feature these areas as completely new and fresh environments. We want to learn what works and what doesn’t and then apply those improvements to our future games to make sure we continue to develop not only ourselves, but also provide community-feeback-driven content to our games.
It Would Be A Dev Blog Without Some Images!
A couple of small bits from behind the scenes, Lonnie has been delving into the world of Photogrammetry. For those who don’t know, it uses real world data captured via a large amount of images to generate accurate, high definition 3D art. Take a look for yourself!
Alongside this, Cindy has been revamping some of our early assets to bring them much more inline with our current quality. For example, check out this awesome gate she’s working on:
That will replace the style of gate seen on the right side of this early-dev loading screen;
And that concludes devblog 9. We are completely open to feedback, opinions or general questions on our discord so please feel free to ask. If you haven’t already joined, you can use the button below!
We also ask that you please join our discord, we love seeing new faces and we are excited to hear people’s feedback, suggestions, questions, theories and everything in between!
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