Walking you through my development of Netherguild up to the present moment!

Posted by DavidCodeAndArt on Jan 19th, 2020

100 Weeks of developing Netherguild

Huddle around the bonfire, friends- it's storytime!





About two years ago, I asked my closest friends- "which one of these games should I make?"

Most (if not all) voted for the second project, and thus, my indie game was born!

A few months afterwards, I had something that looked like this-





Then, after struggling for a long while with 2D art (that story deserves it's own future article), I decided to use 3D voxels-

But, this looks too flat and artificial for a natural or partially natural cave- and the red light (meant to be torch-light originally) feels a bit off-putting...

Looks much better!

Partially inspired by "made in abyss", I added some height to my game!

But these rooms felt empty- and I wanted them to feel a bit more like they were designed by a person. So, with the help of procedural generation and visual effects I slowly built it up;

And ended up with this!

From there on, I designed the game to have both combat;

And things you can interact with-

Then, I added a whole bunch of new features-

For example, I added skills:





I also added equipment for characters to hold and use!





And then even more tweaks, like an initiative system, character following, and changing the fire from sprites to voxels-





Now I'm planning on finishing up some (final!) small improvements, then adding more content, and then more levels below the first 3 ones (and the thing below them).

WIP Cheering Animation! 🙌





But, working on Netherguild hasn't been smooth sailing the whole way- frankly, I was contemplating dropping this project early on because it seemed like it'd be too huge and I'd never finish it, I also didn't know if it'll turn out well or not- and it's not like the difficulties and challenges are over quite yet- (though I'm definitely not going to stop working on it until it's finished!)

With that being said, if you ever struggled with working on a something for a long time, let this motivate you. As much as I know I'm posting this in IndieDB and there's a lot of talented people here, being a solo or indie dev can be really tough at times- but as long as you put the effort and attention in, your game will ultimately get better and more complete, one step at a time- and maybe you can improve and learn from it too.

My game is named "Netherguild"- it's a turn based strategy game & dungeoncrawler, partially inspired by roguelikes (random levels and enemies, but you keep your characters between runs)- it's currently in a free early alpha state.

If it sounds like your jam, or if you want to support me by trying it out, you can try it out here:

Discord (I post builds here before they go public & discuss development):

Discordapp.com

IndieDB (If you're too lazy to scroll up, I got you):

Indiedb.com

Site: www.netherguild.com

Social Media:

Twitter: Twitter.com

Instagram: Instagram.com

Reddit: Reddit.com