The Pitch

 Dan and I are working on a new project, and I'm excited about it. 

Here's the elevator pitch: it's a four-player extraction FPS in which you play as a letter carrier for the Pan Galactic Postal Service. Due to overuse of FTL drives, rifts in the fabric of reality have become a feature of everyday life, with entire neighborhoods becoming immersed in Plasm, a nacreous ooze that seeps into our dimension from another, far-less-hospitable realm. The Plasm is inhabited by hostile entities, and exposure to Plasm mutates living things in our world. It's icky stuff, but it's the price we have to pay to get fresh strawberries delivered from the garden colonies of Wolf 359.

A recent uptick in Plasm activity has forced the citizens of the Galactic Hegemon into lockdown, but that doesn't apply to essential workers, including the dauntless employees of the PGPS. Your mission is to deliver parcels to their proper addresses while navigating a gauntlet of mutated monstrosities, plasmic entities, cultists, security robots, and of course overzealous dogs. Your equipment is limited to whatever you can find in the packages you're delivering - you've got some packing tape on you, so you can reseal any box after using its contents. 

The game's title: Apocalyptic Post.

An early concept for a PGPS letter carrier

In the pursuit of this premise, we dove straight into prototyping last month. It's amazing how much more quickly the brain absorbs information when you've got an idea to chase down - I've been learning modeling and rigging in Blender and level design and blueprints in Unreal Engine 5. In the space of a little more than a month, we've put together a playable level based on this concept of a Niven Ring (note the first-pass idea for what Plasm-infected areas might look like):

 

Gameplay is still very rough, but we've got packages that you can open and/or deliver, little monsters that chase you around, and a not-yet-dangerous-enough Plasm zone. Dan already has multiplayer working, and we're deep in the process of finding where the fun lives. I love how quickly you can get from idea to execution when you're using good tools and not asking your game to do anything technically unprecedented. Unreal is a dream.

I'm still navigating the question of when and how often to post here -- after years of working on projects in secrecy, I'm having to actively work against a lot of bad habits. I really like the idea of keeping this whole journey out in the open. We're still not even sure how or if we'll get funding to expand the game, though we're certainly open to your ideas. We're just going to figure it out as we go along, and maybe by developing the game out loud, we'll get some good advice from others attempting to do similar things. It feels so nice to be a student again.

Anyway, I'm off to go animate my first NPC, who for the time being we're calling Jimmy Rictus:

A sufferer of permanent arooga face

PS. Here's a little thing I threw together to start dialing in the game's tone: