Hello and welcome to my blog. This is a blog about the development of a game with the working title Hatchet. I came up with the idea for this game somewhere around five years ago, and it’s sort of been lingering for a very long time without much in the way of actual development.
There have been times when we’ve started and stopped, played around with the idea, but never really got any prototypes out. The idea now is to actually do that. I have a pretty clear idea of what I want it to do. It may actually prove that what I wanted to do isn’t very fun—but the only way I’m going to find that out is by making a prototype.
So, this blog is the log of the development of that prototype. I’ll be streaming myself working on it, along with a friend of mine, BFG, and working toward completion of the prototype.
So, what is the minimum viable product? What is the completed prototype? Well, the game Hatchet—as I’ll link to the game design document
here—is, in brief, a survival game, but also an action game. It’s sort of like a tower defence game. The premise is that you wake up on an island during the day—everything’s quiet. At night, zombies and stuff come out in increasingly harder waves. You can build up your defences, upgrade your stuff, harvest resources during the day, and fight during the night. It’s supposed to be fast and intense. Bonus points if there’s an interesting story that slowly unlocks what’s actually going on and why you’re there.
This hasn’t really been done before—at least, I’ve found some things that seem close, but nothing that crosses all of this together. So I guess my minimum product is an isometric shooter where you can build. It doesn’t need any fancy animations or anything. I kind of thought it would work if you could just select areas and designate what that area is for. Then you can upgrade and build things in that area.
You might have to man those areas—like an ammunition depot, where you can build bullets out of harvested metals. You can build sentries, but you need power plants to run them.
For a minimum product, I’m thinking: top-down/isometric shooter where zombies come out on a cycle. Maybe not a strict clock cycle—maybe just two separate gameplay styles. I just need to test that each is fun on its own. It doesn’t matter too much if they’re fun together—though I think we can assume they will be.
So yeah, you basically need to be able to build a couple of simple buildings and shoot a couple of simple zombies. I think it needs to be fairly graphic—the gore will be part of the appeal.
Anyway, we’re going to work through this, and the concept will mutate over time. My first session will be planning exactly what I call the "end product."
Stay tuned for that.