The Beginning
Today we are excited to start talking about our next game!
Working title: “Project Beta” is a third person action platforming game set in a cyberpunk future city that has been built higher and higher over time. You will run, climb and jump your way through the now abandoned but still hazardous lower city tiers in search of forgotten resources and technology to fuel the upper most city. Unfortunately you are not necessarily a willing participant in this potentially fatal exercise since you have been “selected as a volunteer.” As such, while you progress you will be given the choice to contribute your collected resources to either the corporate “Volunteer Committee” or the Rebel faction, each earning you favor, rewards and upgrades based on the amount you’ve contributed at the cost of irritating the opposing faction. Unfortunately, both sides can get a bit murdery when irritated so choose your loyalties carefully! As you explore the abandoned and ruined tiers of The City, your loyalty to both factions will let you uncover multiple sides to the story as to what happened to leave such a metropolis all but empty and what your role is in shaping its future.
-At least that’s the pitch.
However, since we are still in early days of development everything should be considered a work in progress and potentially subject to change as the game requires and based on your feedback. In fact, community feedback has already been a large part of development, since the response to our procedural climbing system was so positive and has shaped the game mechanics already, so please feel free to reach out to @UpRoomGames on Twitter with your comments or questions about anything related to the project.
On a personal note, this project is the coming together of a lot of different passion projects and ideas I’ve cultivated over many years, so finally being able to put the pieces together is very exciting and also very nerve wracking.
With that said, actually talking about a project while it’s in early development is certainly different from how we treated our last game A Token War, and community feedback is going to be very important. We’re going to try to have regular updates on the progress being made, usually focusing on a specific design or technical aspect of the game that’s been worked on recently, although there may be some more speculative posts as well. Whether I intend it or not, pretty much everything I write turns into a type of technical post, so it’s pretty safe to say that we’ll be getting into the weeds with these posts. If you enjoy the technical aspects of game development I hope there will be some interesting content for you soon, and thanks for taking the time to check out our next project, we’re very excited and hope you will be too!
PS. If there is enough interest in discussing the development of Project Beta we can work on setting up a Discord server for folks to hang out in, so if you’re interested feel free to let us know over on Twitter!
Other Resources:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/UpRoomGames
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCak4LvnyFv2UqoznfMzHIlg
Free Climbing Tech Demo: https://uproomgames.itch.io/procedural-climbing-tech-demo
Out First Game, “A Token War”: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1496680/A_Token_War/