First prototype

If you’re reading this, welcome behind the scenes of God Swarm. With this first prototype, I can start sharing what I’m working on with this little project.

So let’s start with the beginning. Where did the idea come from? League of Legends released their take on the survivor/swarm genre, that I got really hooked on, so once I’d completed all objectives, my friend suggested vampire survivors, which I also enjoyed quite a lot. I’d also seen a bit of Deep Rock Galactics variation. However, after playing them for a while, I found myself using the same weapons every time, generally just whatever had the highest DPS output, so the game didn’t feel varied and it quickly became boring. I wanted a reason to pick each weapon in different situations. In RPGs, this often is accomplished through different damage types and enemy vulnerabilities or resistances, (and now while writing this, I also think of skill tree decisions, I’ll consider that later on). This could be unarmored/fleshy enemies being vulnerable to slashing or burn damage, or the Pokemon typing system where electricity is super effective vs water types. With such a system I can make different maps or areas, with different enemy types, so different weapons will be effective against them, hopefully making for more varied and engaging gameplay. So this was the idea that started the game.

The simplicity of the basics of the game was also appealing. I could imagine how to program the immediate elements of the game, so it wasn’t too big of a challenge to undertake.

The swarm aspect of the genre, the enemies surrounding you, slowly creeping closer, is really what defines it for me. So a swarm-game made in Godot first became Go Swarm, just for a working title, but quickly changed to God Swarm, because I like the stories and legends from different religions and mythologies. And I really enjoyed imagining what weapons different gods would provide the player. I’d also recently played Hades, so I supposed it was top of mind. So this will probably be the theming of the game, that you somehow will be a mortal earning favor from the gods so they will lend some power, slowly powering you up until you can ascend to god-hood, achieving your power fantasy.

For completeness I will add that, I find that having auto-attacking weapons and only controlling movement and upgrade choices, rather than having activatable abilities with cooldowns, is a big part of what separates it from diabolo-esque or bullet-hell type games (you’re more than welcome to debate this with me, I’m interested in hearing your thoughts on the genre). So initially I’ll be focusing on making interesting weapons and mechanics around the player movement. I imagine this should lead to more interesting movement decisions.

So that’s the initial ideas about the direction of the game. This first prototype has taught me a lot about how to work with Godot. (Thank you Godot for your wonderful tool btw. The “Dodge the Creeps” tutorial was a very fitting beginning for this game.) The prototype features a player walking on an infinite scrolling background with an HP-bar and a flail moving around them, 2 types of enemies spawning randomly that move differently toward the player and deal different amounts of damage.

I hope you enjoy it!