Hey everyone,

we are exicted to post our very first devlog here on itch.io! This one will be a bit longer, the next ones will focus more on the progress we made.

Small patch for Coop Crawler

Before we start with the main devlog, we want to let you now that we uploaded a new version for Coop Crawler. You'll be able the rechoose another hero after your initial selection. We've also improved the keyboard input (still not very fun to play though).

About us

We would like to introduce ourselves. Currently, our team consists of two Computer Science students from Germany. We are in our mid twenties and love video games, especially rolesplaying, strategy and survival games. We would love to develop a full fleshed game and release it before we have finished our studies (which is already in a year :O ).

The origin

Half a year ago, we started the project CoopCrawler that you are seeing right now on itch.io. It took us roughly four months to develop the game to the state it is in right now. It was originally intended to take part in a small game development competition at our university. With that in mind we decided to go for a local multiplayer game with a short but fun playtime.

Where we are going

After completing the game for the competition we felt the need to keep developing games. We brainstormed a  lot about different ideas for a new games, but we came back to CoopCrawler over and over again. We knew the game wouldn't survive with a focus on local-coop. The new version will orient itself more on games like Warframe, where you can team up with people (and friends) online and fight through levels to progress your hero with equipment. The new game focus on:

• Online multiplayer
• Procedurally generated levels (with more diverse types/styles)
• Different character classes (or a similiar concept)
• Character progressions (equipment, level, abilities)
• Intense bossfights

What we have right now

We decided to start the new project from the ground up since a lot of our code became very stale and inflexible. It was a pain in the ass to add new abilities and features without breaking a lot of other stuff. We also learnd A LOT while developing CoopCrawler and we wanted to have a nice, clean und better approach for the new game. We started developing the new game about a month ago. We had to battle our way through networking and we redesigned the ability system to be as flexible as possible. Now it's possible to quickly combine a bunch of different existing behaviours to create new, unique abilities. Also, network is already running kinda nice (with some bugs here and there as you will see below).

Here are some early networking examples:

Here we're synchronizing a lot of projectiles:

Killing some brutes together via internet:

Next steps

Next up we are planning to have a fully procedurally generated dungeon for all clients with some enemies to be killed. We're also improving network lag and stability to have a smoother combat experience. We're intending to release the next devlog in roughly four weeks.

We would love to hear your feedback and ideas.

Until the next time,

Cheers