I’ve been away for so long but I have an excuse this time. Since 2014 I’ve been planning to make a videogame along with my wife. But it was not until December 13th last year when we finally decided to start. Since then, development and real game design started on this project called “Braveless”.

Braveless is a 2D sidescroller game with a pixel art style. It’s influenced by Dark Souls in relation to difficulty and progression. It also contains some survival elements and exploration such as hunger and thirst. Both play important roles to progress throughout the game.

The game is set in a medieval environment where magic once ruled. Kingdoms started abusing such power, forcing the ancient Channelers to seal it away. The Channelers were known as high wizards, devoted to protect the magic of the world. After the sealing ritual, something went wrong. Since then, a strange curse has been tormenting all kingdoms in the world.

Thus, the curse destroyed the home of our hero, forcing him to leave. With nothing else to lose, he ventures forth to Kleuhn Highlands, where it’s told the curse comes from.

That’s all I can tell for the story right now. I’m actually the one in charge of the story writing and I gotta say this has been very difficult for me. But this is one of many challenges I’ve accepted in this ambitious project of ours.

Now for the art, my wife’s taking care of it. But it has turned out to be a challenge for her too. She’s a freelance artist and is the first time she works with pixel art, tiles and environments.

For animations we decided to go with the frame by frame approach. This has turned out to take a lot of time since my wife’s not used to animation and she works full time. So, I’ve been also working on animating the characters she comes up with. At least while we have enough resources to hire a professional animator.

Like I said before, I’ve accepted many challenges assuming the roles of a storywriter, animator and a game designer. I’m also coding the whole thing (which is my specialty) in Unity3D. I’ve already built several systems for most of the gameplay aspects.

Let’s see; I’m going to list most of the systems I’ve already coded which we could say are some of the features in our game:

• Movement system
• Combat system
• Hunger/thirst system
• Leveling up system
• Stats/upgrades progression system
• Day time system
• Crafting/cooking system
• Fishing system (yeah I already made this just for fun 😀 )

This may give you a slight idea of what the game is about.

To end this short post I’ll leave a couple of screenshots of how the game is looking so far.

 

(This is not the final art of the game and it may change in the future)

I’ll be posting later about each system so you can get a better angle of every mechanic in the game. Hopefully we can get some feedback from anyone.

Thanks for reading.