War Video Report

Explosions heard far away. Closing in. Zero line. Daily commute. Contact. We listen, we look, we play - filtered and protected. Lives end on an anonymous battlefield. On our screen. Not on our screen.

War Video Report, a game by periphery, is coming soon.

This is our game War Video Report. We have already developed a 2D isometric system and the core game logic. Now we are working on the assets and the layout of our world. You can have a look into our progress at our bsky page. Happy to hear your feedback :) #screenshotsaturday #gamedev #indiedev

The game' trigger system in action. The colored elements are a debug visualization of invisible triggers in the world. Once the line is crossed the trigger event happens. Triggers cause enemy spawns, artillery bombardement, ambient sound changes and also some scripted events. #gamedev #indiedev

Here is a prototype for the trigger system of our game and then the actual implementation. It does not look like much, but getting this to work was quite some effort. Prototyping systems in a separate small program works out well. #gamedev #indiedev

Here the destruction system of War Video Report in action. architecture assets are not final. We are still establishing a workflow that balances the demands of the isometric world, the look and not least: efficiency. #indiedev #gamedev

We brought War Video Report quite a bit forward this year. With most basic systems in place we are looking forward to building this world next year. Thanks for following us! #indiedev #gamedev

Some finetuning on our enemy AI. The enemy soldier has a few behaviours: take cover, chase, attack, evade and dying. The difficulty lies in separating the conditions for each behaviour properly, to avoid the system getting stuck in one state. #indiedev #gamedev

🎧 We now have a system to place ambient sounds and background music into the game world. #indiedev #gamedev

This is a screenshot of our monochrome game War Video Report showing the pixelart look and the destruction states of the new assets for the first time.

War Video Report undergoes a major look update at the moment. We will soon share a bigger blogpost here where we show the look dev progress in detail. #indiedev #gamedev

A small detail - custom spawn points for bullets. Mimicking an isometric perspective in 2D needs lots of little tweaks like this. #indiedev #gamedev

We have adapted the persistent destruction system to the main game. All the destruction is reloaded after death and after restart. #gamedev #indiedev

An important feature of our game is, that the world becomes more and more destroyed the more you play. In this simple proto we set up a save state, that remembers the world and loads the same destroyed world when the game is started again. #indiedev #gamedev

We are actively working on our first test map. Here are early sketches to explore asset- and level design. #gamedev #indiedev #conceptart #leveldesign #lookdev

Music will have a small, but important role in War Video Report. Here one of our early explorations. #gamedev #indiedev #gamemusic

Thirty seconds of gameplay, of where we're at. #gamedev #indiedev #WarVideoReport

Thank‘s for your feedback and lovely words! This means a lot to us. We are tweaking the asset production pipeline and style guide rn to get better visual readability. There will be a bigger post in 2 to 3 weeks and we are eager to hear your thoughts on it.

While working on all game systems, we are in the midst of tweaking the look of our game. Our vision is a 1-bit look reminiscent of thermal imaging.

#indiedev #gamedev

A sketch of one of our enemy AI final state machines. We realized planning the FSM out carefully first on paper helped a lot. Each arrow represents a state transition that is conditioned by a set of Booleans. The exit conditions are shown in the "Exit State Matrix" on the left. #gamedev #indiedev

We now have a system, that detects objects between explosions and the player and takes into account how they dampen the blast. In the video you see how the "expl.objdamp" value goes up, as the violet probe passes through the walls.

#indiedev #gamedev #indiegames #gamedevelopment

The concept of „fun“ in a war game is something we are questioning in „War Video Report“. If you are interested, we describe the mood we are going for in our pinned post:

We are adding mechanics bit by bit. Here fpv drones are chasing and attacking the player.

#indiedev #gamedev #indiegames #gamedevelopment

We made progress with enemy AI in the last weeks. Surprisingly it does not take much to make a very mean enemy, especially when you give them grenades. #indiedev #gamedev #indiegames #gamedevelopment

Glad you like it! The next one is already in the making :)

We are proudly re-inventing the wheel for the purpose of learning. ;)

How we handle Z Order in our isometric game. It took us a while to come up with our current solution, and we’d love to hear your thoughts on it.

We created a blog! Our first post goes in-depth on how we managed to properly display our player in front of or behind assets — creating the illusion of 3D in our 2D game. #indiegames #indiegame #gamedev #indiedev

Do we dare call this "gameplay"? Last week we had some progress with enemy AI. Here a test level with randomly spawning enemy soldiers. #indiedev #gamedev #indiegame

We do not have many assets in the game yet. But this poor car has been bumped into, hidden behind, shot up and hit with grenades countless times during testing so far.

#gamedev #indiedev #indiegame

we implemented blood and injured walking to visualize health without UI #indiedev #gamedev

We hear you and transition the code to a turn-based game as we speak. ♟️

Adding a gun - by hand - with mouse - to 80 frames of animation - yay. #indiedev #gamedev #pixelart #aseprite