Devlog #3 – Playable Demo!

This Week’s Prototypes – Big Updates! 

We’re thrilled to share some exciting progress on our game! Our first playable demo is ready, allowing us to test mechanics, fine-tune variables, and push towards the final version.

We Have a Name! 

After much brainstorming, our team has finally settled on a name: Beetlefield Blast! While it might evolve in the future, we all love it for now. We were trying to go for an alliteration. And this one felt very good as Beetlefield was a pun on battle field. For those of you wondering what the other options were that almost won:

• Bugged out!
• Warriors of Elderbloom/boom
• Beetle Bash

Let us know if you think we chose the wrong name!

Character Improvements 

Only one character

To streamline development, we’ve decided to use one character model and customize it with shaders. This allows us to:

• Change colors to represent different teams (we will do this by applying shaders to certain parts of the characters)
• Scale models to indicate different classes

What is this character?

The new characters are going to be beetles! The reason for this choice is because the artists liked beetles! Also for the shaders we could choose specific parts of the beetle to have different colors. If we would for example take a rhino that would look weirder to have a green one for example.

A Touch of Lore – Intro Animation 

We’ve added an intro animation to bring our world to life! It introduces the legends of the Boomfruit, adding depth to the game’s story. You can see more about this animation in the demo later on in this devlog! It shows how the boomfruit drops from the tree and that is why the beetles have to fight!

Dynamic Bomb & Ball Coloring 

The bomb now changes color based on the area it’s in, improving visibility and strategy. 

Why?

There are multiple reasons for this:

• You can see on which team field the ball is
• If not all teams are selected you can see to which field the ball is closest to
• It's just cool, let's be honest :)

Some Basic UI

We have also added some basic UI in the demo to navigate through the game:

•  a start screen
•  a pause screen
•  a victory screen. 

This way, you can now navigate through the game more easily and restart if needed.

Playable Demo

Below are some GIFs showcasing our playable demo. You can select different teams and different characters to than play the game and push the Boomfruit to the other team's side!

Plans for Next Week

• Starting the production of the actual game
• Developing the ball mechanics
• Developing the weapon mechanics
• And probably even more...

Thank you for checking out our post! We will keep you all updated!

Feel free to comment your feedback!

Cya next week!