About a month ago, I was finally able to get back to developing a new game.
It's been almost a year since toocha was put on hold. All this time, I was thinking in the background about what to do with the arena. The thing is, I didn't like what I had at the time. First of all, all the weapons felt like the same thing. Because of this, the battles were also pretty similar, which quickly led to them being boring to watch. However, in Domina (which is one of the main sources of inspiration for this game), all the battles also look the same, so this in itself is not really a problem.
But the worse thing was that to implement all my ideas, I would have to spend a huge amount of time and effort, and the result, most likely, would not be very good. It's hard to say in advance how it would have turned out, but I think the battles would still have been monotonous. So I thought a lot about how to solve this problem.
One of the ideas was adding a third force. If there could be some dangerous anomaly or some powerful monster on the battlefield, it would make the battles more diverse. But this is only a partial solution to the problem and it would require even more time and effort.
I decided to go the other way and completely replace the previous combat system with something else. Now, instead of different types of weapons (machine guns, shotguns, grenade launchers, baseball bats, etc.), there will only be magic wands. By the way, this does not limit your imagination too much, because you still can come up with many interesting spells.
And to make the battles fun, I added crowds of small weak units (minions) to the game. They run at each other and create bloody chaos. By the way, adding minions allowed me to come up with many new types of spells related specifically to the crowd control.
I like what I have now much more than what I had a year ago. But there are still problems to solve. The main problem is the graphics. I've always had problems with the graphics because I'm not an artist, I can’t draw pretty images. Usually the abstract minimalist style saves me, but for some reason in this game it still looks so-so. It's hard to say what the problem is, maybe I chose the colors poorly.
Next month I'll spend a week or two on updates, so the progress in the game development will be less, but I think I'll have something to show :)
Video: https://youtu.be/0JVMTCmbzPw