DevLog #7 – Fill the world with bullets

Hello everyone!

We talked last week about jumping in project “Stasis”. Today, let’s show another important gameplay mechanic: shooting! You will get a special gun very early in the game. It constitutes one of the main ways of interacting with the world. You will need it to fight your way through waves of enemies and also to solve puzzles. The gun will have several modes (we think 5 is a good number) to account for different uses. Let’s present the first two modes in this devlog. No technical details today, but several GIFs! At this end of this post, we also reveal the release date of our upcoming technical demo, so be sure to read until there!

Fight mode

As the name suggests, this mode is intended for fighting and this is the only one that inflicts damage. It comes with a limited clip that forces to reload regularly. However, do not worry about running out of ammo in combat: the ammo is infinite. We set a limited clip only to induce some strategy. Some enemies can be invulnerable for a moment during a specific pattern. Thus, you have to manage your clip wisely to shoot many bullets at any opportunity to make damage.

The fight mode comes with different statistics such as damage, knock-back power, accuracy (it determines the spread angle of the bullet when shooting), or critical hit chance (critical hits do quad damage). Some of these will be affected by the skills you pick in the skill tree.

In the future, this mode will also have slots to equip some items altering even more the stats or adding special bullet behaviors. Since fighting is only one aspect of the game, we don’t plan to add as many bullet modifiers like Enter the Gungeon or The Binding of Isaac, but we wish to implement enough to allow for some fun shooting action.

Energy mode

The second mode of the gun comes handy firstly for puzzles. These bullets are charged with energy and can trigger various buttons. To avoid some frustration while executing a puzzle solution, we decided to set 100% accuracy on this mode and to have an infinite clip.

Even though the bullets don’t inflict damage to enemies, we wish this gun mode to also have a use in combat. That’s why each puzzle mode will have a unique ability that can be strategically used while fighting to grant you an edge.

Energy bullets have the capacity to break powering. Some enemies have a pattern where they stop for a few seconds to power a more powerful—obviousy—attack. If you hit them with enough energy bullets before their attack if fully powered, you cancel their charged attack. This also sets the enemies in a temporary weak state where they take extra damage.

For most fights (a.k.a. all except boss fights), using the special abilities of harmless modes won’t be mandatory. You can win by shooting only bullets of the main fight mode. However, if you switch mode when relevant and master its use, it will give you a both defensive and offensive great advantage. Cancelling charged attacks means fewer bullets to dodge and weakening enemies means killing them faster.

Upcoming technical demo!

We will release our technical demo on June 25th! It will be available on our itch.io page, for Windows, Mac and Linux, so follow us there to download it as soon as it gets online!

It will feature 15-20 minutes of gameplay where you can discover the first half of what will become in the future the starting dungeon of the game. The demo includes a bunch of puzzle rooms, some fighting and the beginning of the skill tree. It doesn’t contain any story element yet since we first want our core mechanics to be fun and robust.

We put a lot of work in this and we look forward to share this demo with you! To keep you waiting, here is the current logo of the game application where you see the main character named Emi 🙂

See you next week for the release!