Orn117 Devlog 1

"Running into debt isn’t so bad. It’s running into creditors that hurts."

Orn117 is still in the early stages of development, but prototyping has gone well. It’s being developed in Unreal Engine 4.25, which has accelerated the development quite drastically from early prototypes in unity.

At the moment, we are entirely Blueprint based as well, this has proven to be very swift in terms of implementation speed and durable to changes given good development standards. Additionally, I don’t think well run into issues with networking at least in the immediate term, given the lack of a matchmaking system, and being entirely room/squad based.

Currently, I’ve gone through some adjustments on the specs and the initial vision of the project which started tuned more towards a space combat on rails with a horde shooter hook. Now, as it stands, the real juice of the game is the horde airlock events, and looting foreign stations.

So, we have limited the scope down to rapidly being able to provoke these events, and get on board to the procedural stations that will need to be looted or cleared to complete missions.

The idea of debt and net worth seems like an interesting mechanic to explore from a player initiative perspective, which allows for some impetus to be drawn from that in the story itself. I’ve been concepting around a parallel story to the actual gameplay, so at no point will you be forced into story mode missions to continue playing as a freelancer, and completing the story will not impact the character’s ability to run missions as they see fit.

Concept art is still up in the air, as a couple of directions for visual style are being explored. I think an interesting one is a throwback sprite based characters, though ways to make this work with Z-axis and multiplayer are still in the air.

Development on some interesting tech related to hallways and room generation is progressing, hoping to share some interesting things there when its closer to complete.

Not as much to share in this update as I would like, since visuals are preliminary, next dev update will have some screens and some UI work thats a bit farther a long. Hopefully a procgen example and some breakdown of that as well.