Build for DD56

Pilots,
It’s been an incredible journey since the introduction of (a)woken on itch, back in january 2024.

....... don't worry, I'm not shutting it down lol

For the past few months I've been learning about gamedev. This is the latest build of my game.

The main inspiration is hawken, but instead of going for a 1/1 recreation (which is honestly beyond my current skills), I've been taking many liberties with the game mechanics and everything else.

The previous "devlogs" were merely sterile changelogs where i mentioned what was changed compared to the previous build. I think it's finally time to go more in depth regarding where I started from, and where I'm going from there.

Personally, I have always been extremely fond of offline, singleplayer games. Hawken is arguably the only exception to this, the only online game that actually managed to hook me enough for me to break this "rule" I had to avoid getting attached to live services, because they all eventually shut down.

And shut down it did. This effectively left a void in my gaming experience, because in all honesty, no other game is like hawken. Everything about it is just so satisfying to me, its aesthetic, its balance, the entire vibe of the maps, ost, designs etc. all come perfectly together. 

The years went by, and I had pretty much resigned myself to just play offline singleplayer games honestly. I just saw no appeal in most other online offerings, and I was (rightfully) afraid of them shutting down as well, and I find nothing more annoying to invest time into a game and then becoming unable to ever play it again.

Eventually, hawken reborn was announced. Me and many other old time hawken aficionados were understandably ecstatic about the news. Finally, after years of waiting, we would have become able to move on from the old, janky hacked together pre-alpha builds of the game to play again online with thousands of old and new players.

It was not worth the wait. The game suffered from an incredibly rushed, flawed development, and the final result was a barely playable prototype even more broken than the old alpha that we were playing privately. Updates were few and far in between, and the direction of the "progress" was clearly not catering to the old time fans. 

For a long time while playing together, we had joked about how one of us would have eventually created the "unnamed hawken fangame" that would have given justice to the original. WIP projects surfaced and were quickly abandoned periodically.

Of course, MY OWN GAME is never going to live up to THOSE standards, not in a million years, but it's useful to have an objective to aim for, to become more ambitious over time as my standards raise.

Becoming a gamedev had always been a long standing dream of mine, but I had never actually had the guts to TRY. The task seemed unsurmountable. The amount of skills and effort required to even begin building something was completely alien to my old, lazy, cowardly mindset.

My original demo was extremely barebones, it was barely holding together. I put it together as a complete noob in a few weeks. And yet the reception I received from my fellow /agdg/ devs was encouraging. Some of them also had fond memories of playing hawken back in the day, and I was given plenty of solid, extremely valuable feedback to build up from there.

And build I did. I learned new skills and became slightly better at them over time, and I progressively dealt with the various items in my feedback list. Now I can finally see what was once a pipedream to me, making a game, as a matter of investing time and effort into becoming better as an artist and a dev rather than an impossibility. Becoming better as a person in the process imho.

Where to go from there? The main idea I had for my game was always to keep things simple and progressively expand from there. An endless arcade mode (which still needs to be expanded to have a proper gameplay loop), a single player boomer shooter style offline story mode with several levels (I have barely started building the first one, many more to come), and eventually maybe, MAYBE a multiplayer mode, which is miles beyond my current skill level.

Will my game ever become good enough to actually sell it? Will my skills keep on increasing or will I eventually hit a wall? I don't know. Creativity and hard work are uncharted territory for me. My major concerns were finally getting out of my old comfort zone, and growing as a person by learning new skills. The fact that those objectives are being achieved is already a monumental victory to me.

I really hope I can keep working on my game and make it more enjoyable, and I have to thank the demo days for giving me a clear deadline and an incentive to keep going.