This episode recaps the development of .lazr., a local multiplayer cyber-neon glitch-punk arena shooter for up to four data-punks, and what is expected to happen in the near future…

This story starts in Montpellier, France, at the intersection of two interests. The first was an obsession with a video game called Warsow, and the other was organising and participating in game jams.

Warsow

Warsow is a futuristic, fast-paced multiplayer FPS, built on the Quake 2 engine. It’s the kind of game that would be playing in the background in cyberpunk movies whenever the hero goes into a smokey dive-bar and all the neon-goth kids are taking weird drugs before indulging in the colourful hyper-violence of digital escapism.

I love the flow of this game. At times it’s fluid, gracefully bouncing from surface to surface at high speed, at others it’s jarring, short bursts of railgun fire jolt the game to a halt as points are scored. This, if anything, is what video games are all about. (The opinions of the author are the opinions of the author. The author played a lot of Doom as a kid and likes to make pew pew noises with their mouth.)

Game jams

Game jams are events where people get together, usually for a weekend, and make games. The format changes, but generally they’re 48 hours long and have some kind of theme or design guideline that the games are supposed to adhere to.

With a group of friends in Montpellier, we founded Baptême du Jeu (literally “baptism by game”, a play on “baptism by fire”). We were a small society dedicated to introducing people to the joy of making games, and our modus operandi centred around game jams. Lots of game jams…

We hosted quite a few Ludum Dare gatherings and Global Game Jam locations. We also had our in-house game jam called Fu(nky|ture) (pronounced “Funky Future”) that focused on multiplayer games.

Genesis

During our first Fu(nky|ture), I spent most of my time trying to get basic online play working, and ended up settling on a very simple game about squares shooting each other that you could play online with friends. When I say very simple, I mean VERY simple. There was no cover, no hit-points and only basic “first to 5” scoring. All you could do was click to spawn, click to shoot towards the mouse, and move about with WASD. It was 2D, a simple black background with blue and red squares for players and blue and red lines for shot markers.

But the DNA for the future was there: Competitive, simple, single-hit kills, and bit of recoil on your weapon that added a layer of extra depth.

The Neolithic era

I really really liked this idea. It was all the things I liked about Warsow, but stripped way down to the bare minimum. You could shoot, you could move, you could win. Also, shooting and moving had this weird relationship, in that you need to move to be in position to shoot, and you can shoot to help boost yourself around.

I experimented…

Basic prototype for 2D rocket-jumping

I made quite a few of these prototypes, trying to find the the nice sweet-spot that lies at the intersection of frantic, fluid and twitchy.

.lazr.

Eventually I called some friends to hang out at the local pub, gave them controllers and let them duke it out in the first ever playable version of .lazr.

First ever public screenshot

That green mess was the screenshot I used to lure them into accepting my invitation. It doesn’t look like much, and frankly, it isn’t, but it’s a proof of concept, and in my eyes the concept was proven.

Art and weapon iterations

I wrote up a little design document (because that’s what all the cool kids do now days), that you can read here: https://gist.github.com/Bradshaw/8898616

I didn’t read the document much, but being “serious” about the whole thing meant I kept going rather than just having another abandoned folder in my ever-expanding “projects” directory.

The direction the art ended up going in

After hundreds upon hundreds of iterations, and about six months of development, I deemed the project “ready”, cooked up a trailer in one evening (I really hate video editing) and unceremoniously dumped the game on Itch.io

Turns out, if you don’t promote your game properly, people don’t know about it. And if people don’t know about it, people don’t buy it.

I’ve made 174 sales of .lazr. in the two years since release. I’m not sure what to think about that number. It’s so brutally low, that it’s not even an insult to the quality of the game. It’s obscure, inexistent, void.

And because one night I was bored last year, I put it on Steam Greenlight…

The end

As sales trickled in at about one per month, the Greenlight vultures compared it to another game with similar neon aesthetics that apparently disappointed them. There were bugs in the game due to a mix of inexperience and an “organic” development style, the bugs were hard to fix because the code was messy and poorly compartmentalised, and because procrastination. (Writing this article is also procrastination. The only way I could ever stop procrastinating is if my job was to procrastinate, and then my brain would find some convoluted way to avoid doing that).

I gave up on the game, blocked new sales on Itch.io and set it aside as “a thing what I did but didn’t do proper”…

Derplight

Haha, fuck you punctuation!

So I got this in my inbox the other day… I thought it was some kind of scam. At first it even took me a while to remember that I’d put .lazr. on Greenlight. And then I opened a separate browser tab to log in to Steam manually to make sure I wasn’t the victim of phishing or something.

It’s true, if you put a game on Greenlight and ignore it for 288 days, it eventually makes it through. I think they have some kind of pity algorithm built in.

What now?

I could just upload .lazr. to Steam and call it a day. But that would be dishonest, and frankly, quite pointless.

.lazr. is buggy, it’s hard to learn, it’s rough around the edges, and it could do with some extra features that would make it a more worthwhile purchase, so I really don’t feel comfortable putting it out the on the greatest storefront of digital games.

But there’s no way in hell I’m digging through that clusterfuck of code I wrote three years ago!

So, what do?

My plan is to port .lazr. to Unity, it’s a more future-proof engine, it enforces nicer programming styles, and through the power of the asset store, it might allow me to add some schweet features like stats, achievements, online play, and whatever new-fangled thing the kids are into now.

The gameplay that is already available will be ported to the new version, and I intend to add some new stuff, like online play (quite a few requests), single player and co-op challenges, team modes, and maybe some other stuff.

Watch this space

If all this sounds interesting to you, then please, watch this space. You can follow me on Twitter, or here on Medium. If you’d like to support me in this endeavour join me on Patreon.

I’m going to share the development process, if I find a better way to record and stream I’ll make some videos, I’ll make some of the code available and I’ll do my best to answer questions along the way. Thanks to the 174 people who believed in .lazr. so far, I will do my best to get the sweetest ever cyber-neon glitch-punk arena shooter available to you and your friends, you deserve it!