Dev Log No. 0

Welcome to our developer log series! We are starting this series to give you a behind-the-scenes view of what we are making. I will try my best to not get too technical so that you can follow along without knowing much about programming and stuff like that. It will mostly just be me showing you what we have made through some screenshots and explaining it on a high level. But enough about that, let me show you what we are working on.

Pond [on hold]

I have learned from experience, and failed attempts, that it's always a good idea to prototype the core gameplay of a game before investing too much time into its development. If the core gameplay is not fun then the game is not going to be fun. For my bachelor project I made a prototype of a koi breeding game called Pond. After I finished my studies we picked up development at Grosshaus Dev but soon realized that there was something missing from the core concept. You could breed fish and get all kinds of different colors and shapes of koi but the actual gameplay was just not very fun.

I really love idea of Pond but we have had to put the development on ice until we can come up with a concept that's fun to play.

Alone [active]

While I was still studying and working on Pond I found myself wanting to try out some ideas I had for a first-person survival game. As a kid I was fascinated by the stories about shipwrecks along the coast of where I am from in South Africa, and how the survivors had to survive. I had attempted to put this into a game in 2017 already, but at the time my programming knowledge was limited and my scope too large. Coming back to the same concept six years later I kept the scope small and actually applied what I learned while studying. Wow! This gave birth to the game we are currently working on.

I decided to call the game Alone because it's a lonely survival simulator. The concept is a survival RPG that focuses on building your character across multiple plays. The three pillars of our planned gameplay is action, puzzle and strategy. We want to give players more than one way of doing things and allow them to choose how they want to progress.

The idea is not to survive indefinitely, but rather to make your way out of the situation you are stuck in, and then unlock more maps, perks, characters, etc. It starts out with you being shipwrecked in southern Africa in the 16th century but the concept of the game allows other maps to be added that are set in completely different time periods. It's all about survival and we want to challenge our players with a variety of different settings, spread across different time-periods.

As the name suggests the focus is on you surviving alone, so there's no intent to add multiplayer. We are still unsure if there will be NPC's on the maps and what role they could play.

Alone is still in the prototyping phase. This means we are implementing the core mechanics and testing them to see if it's fun to play. Our plan is to release an early alpha demo by the end of 2025.

Thank you for taking the time to read this developer log. In the next one I will show you what we are currently working on for Alone. If you like what we are doing then you can subscribe to stay up to date with us.

Today I will leave you with this quote by Antoine de Saint Exupéry. I find it summarizes our vision as Grosshaus Dev quite well.

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."

We are passionate about what we make and want to pass that passion on to the people entrusted to us.

Have an awesome day and I'll see you in the next one!

Isak