The Evolution of a Game

This has been one wild ride. Our game is completely unrecognizable compared to what we started with. Here is our game's story.

The original pitch was for a grenade based fighting game. All players would have really high mobility, resulting in the grenades to increase the odds of hitting opponents even while moving at high speeds. It would have featured a percentage based damage system similar to Smash Bros, with the only way to beat opponents being to knock them off the stage. It didn't stay that way for long, though.

Other team members liked the overall idea, but were worried about the multiplayer nature. A similar game had been made in Montreal, and it would have required learning networking. As our team doesn't have a programmer, that would not have been fun. Anther idea up on the board was for a third person platformer, similar to Jack and Daxter and the like. We decided to combine the two, making a high agility grenade based platformer.

The original game was set inside a giant space alien, and featured a super dark, Alien-esq art style. Insectoid enemies would hound the player. The players' goal would be to collect the parts of their ship, obtain powers, and get out of the alien. However, our main prop artist was having trouble with the enemies, and things weren't going to well.

The same artist then had the brilliant idea of doing underwater pirates instead. Fish would be a lot easier to generate than insects. We talked about it, and eventually landed on Space Pirates. The setting was still in a giant space alien (in this case, a space whale), but it was much brighter with a heavier emphasis on exploration and collection rather than combat. The grenades were almost cut entirely, but remained as Cannonballs in order to combat enemies we would place in the player's way to block their exploration. Most of the extra powers were cut due to time restraints, and we kept plugging away.

Our programmer was messing around with enemy ideas, and created what we now call Antibodies and Hives; enemies that spawned swarms of smaller enemies that would relentlessly chase the player, turning things into a pseudo bullet-hell. We loved it, and kept and refined the little guys. They really added a lot to the game, allowing us to throw more than platforming challenges and basic enemies at the player. The hives are fully customization as well, with multiple Antibody types and the ability to customize their patterns.

We never would have guessed our game would go from a grenade based fight, to a pirate Metroidvania to a first person, high agility bullet hell adventure, but it did and it's wonderful.