Hello! My name is Josh and I am the designer, coder and producer of Gutwhale! In this series of devlogs, I will talk about how Gutwhale became the game that it is now. This series of posts will cover prototyping, design, production, implementation, trying to give good directions to my team as well as the whole process of getting a game on steam! If there is something you are interested in, please do not be shy and just ask! I can dedicate a couple of these posts to answering your questions about Gutwhale, or about game development in general! But let us gets started: [h1] [b]The Beginning of Gutwhale[/b] [/h1] This game started as a little prototype I did for fun! I coded someone with very long arms holding a gun, using Box2D physics: [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/37118717/194a0a2b9bad547e3ec4e98f3c25b006bad5e353.gif[/img] I really enjoyed the feeling of this, but it was very hard and weird to control! When you walked, the gun would lag behind you and it could get stuck on overhead ledges and stuff like that :) But i liked the physicality of this prototype and continued in this direction, while trying to make it more accessible. Here you can see the 2nd iteration: [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/37118717/5fee7e4033e672723c801131ebd47b66bb4b6808.gif[/img] The gun is now firmly attached to the player, but still behaves like a physic object, trying to keep up with the players movement! This enables players to shoot not only left or right, but at wide angles, if they time it right! Compare to the first version, this was very easy to control. It lacked some of the physicality, but still felt pretty nice, I made a modular gun holding system so playery could hold gun in different ways, to make it more interesting. Then I quickly added simple physics based enemies to shoot at: [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/37118717/46d820ea9469c85bc6873e0a0b2d36b324ede192.gif[/img] I added a little bit of test art and it looked like this: [url={STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/37118717/0f3602f9cfbba91e09addf772965d5d16198f2e7.gif][img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/37118717/0f3602f9cfbba91e09addf772965d5d16198f2e7.gif[/img][/url] When I tried to make these enemies more interesting, i quickly realised something: It is very, very hard to create reliable gameplay with physics. Often things spin out of control, enemies fly around and aiming a physics driven gun is really hard and feels bad when you are in intense situations! So i decided to start from scratch and remove the physics, but keep the general "weighty" feeling of the game! And this is how Gutwhale became a sidescrolling shooter! It started as a fun thing that I then tried to make useable. That failed, but the core aspectets of these first prototypes remain in the game today! Thanks for reading! Next time I will talk about how the core mechanics of Gutwhale evolved over the span of a few, intense days of prototyping! Cheers, Josh