Steel Love - Damian's Gambit

Introduction

Take control of Trik, smack bots and help Damian restore Gigantimus to avert the apocalypse!

This game is far from complete, but there is a small story chain as well as a few combat areas to tackle and multiple enemy types. I've included a menu with debug functions too so that you can unlock the whole map, all enemy enounters and respawn timers, spawn random weapons, make yourself invulnerable and more!

Controls

• Camera - Mouse
• Movement - WASD
• Attack / Dodge / Talk - Spacebar
• Pickup item / Swap Item - Shift
• First Person View - F (buggy - really just for looking around)
• Pause / Settings Menu / Status and Objectives / Debug Features - ESC

Gameplay Tips

• If you find Damian and speak to him it'll start you on the story content.
• Line up enemies to knock them into each other and cause chain damage. 
• Knocking an enemy into another stops their special attacks.
• You're invulnerable to ground wave damage while performing your attack.

Installation

It's a zipped Unity executable. Simply uncompress and it's ready to go!

How Development Evolved

The game was originally planned be a very small NPC hub area and a series of room based dungeons similar to those found in 2D Zelda games. The dungeons would be accessible via a 'spinevator' located in Gigantimus' spine. The dungeons themselves would all be tech/scrap/sewer themed as you progressed deeper down, culminating in an optional fight with DSD. They all had punny spine themed names like the Cervical Canals, Lumbar Lair, Sacrum Sanctum, etc. When dungeon crawling it'd also swap to a fixed camera perspective instead of the third person one currently in the game.

Despite a lot of work going into them, I never got the planned modular dungeon components feeling right. Time was also quickly running out so I decided I'd expand some areas of the NPC hub to become combat zones instead and ditch the fixed camera perpsective areas entirely. This had a ton of impact on the existing enemy behaviours and abilities and as a result I don't think they're as fun to fight.

Enemies themselves ended up being one of the biggest time sinks. Mainly getting their pathing AI (either for tracking the player or wandering around)  playing nicely with their ragdoll physics. Being able to smack them up in the air also worked great for the planned dungeon style format but made for a mess of glitches in a more open world. Hence they often abrutly hit invisible walls in the air.

Grabbing stuff with your tail was also meant to be a much more integrated gameplay mechanic. Lots of puzzle plans involving grabbable fuses and batteries to power lasers, elevators, doors, pits, fans, etc. Pulling long levers to trigger timed events, etc.

An early testing area featuring what would become the partially exposed ribs of Gigantimus. He doesn't look too happy about it at all.

The final design of Gigantimus before he was torn apart and spread around the scrap island. You can see a tiny Trik for scale next to his left hand. Any experienced modeler would cry if they could see the absolute state of this mesh underneath. Horrific.

Some overly ambitious early map planning after dropping the dungeons plan.

Cut Content

I ran out of time for a ton of the planned (and actually pretty crucially important) features of the game. I figured I'd at least share some of them here for anyone who is interested.

Vending Machine Snacks
Health management was going to be a  more important factor.  The only way to replenish health would be from limited supplies from the vending machine in the plaza. Each snack would restore different amounts of HP or also increaase your maximum HP. Scrap picked up from the enemies was the currency. I ended up needing to under-balance enemies a ton as I ran out of time for testing so this became low priority. Mmmmm. Borg.

      

Equipment
Upgrades to your Vaccuslate were also planned. Bringing Mrs. Frieda bolts of cloth would allow her to increase your scrap storage capacity. Also there were plans for little hard hats you could find that would protect you from a single hit of damage before breaking. One small detail that isn't really covered is that your backpack is a device created by Sumiv to help you locate robot parts. The little antenna links up to the one on the staff he carries. The menu tab currently being used for debug functions was originally going to be a map screen (ala 2D zelda) with a sonar ping showing where the next part was.

Weapons
There were going to be very Zelda: BOTW inspired weapon pickups with low durability scattered throughout each level. Including the legendary Dragon Forged Smackexcailbur and Schippie Schtabber. Red robots were also going to pickup weapons they could find as their special ability. Each weapon had some different variables on damage, physics strike force, strike angle, hitbox and durability. You can still spawn these in via the debug menu!

Damian
Even though you play as Trik, Damian really was intended to be the focus of the story. I wanted the players to question his motives as the game progressed. Was this all a ploy to end up with Singuliera? Why did he choose this exact time and location to bring everyone together? In the end his motives would've been proven pure and he would sacrifice himself in the final battle.

Dark Schippie Dues
You can see him lurking in the distance, but the actual fight never made it in. He would've been accessible via the area filled with purple/green pipes. He would attack with a combination of dropping huge objects on you and a dashing stab with a huge range. To deal any damage, you'd need to get him to stab into one of those dropped objects, causing him to stagger and drop his dagger. You could then pick it up and give him a lil poke.


ZIV
Ziv was going to be the boss of the third combat area. He'd attack using thrown ground-wave time bombs and a Dragoon inspired jump attack that'd cause large cross pattern aoes on the ground. If you died during the fight, Jebb would appear and sacrifice himself to defeat Ziv.

Averagmus
This sprite was only really made for dialogue purposes. The culmination of the game would've been a simple fight between a restored Gigantimus (that somehow now more closely resembled a mecha-grazaloidzilla) and the half formed Giant Robot Averagmus.

SCR-552
Not just a cute mascot character and mouth piece for Trik. SCR-552 was intended to have many more features and reasons to be accompanying Trik on his missions for Damian. Including being able to project holograms of characters to talk with during dungeons or providing  a light as environmental lighting became increasingly scarce.

PINK ROBOT
The pink robot's ability was going to be a 'broadcast' mode where it would cause all nearby enemies to temporarily glow red, become invulnerable and cause damage if struck. This worked better in the initial fixed camera perspective zelda style dungeons but was just annoying with the other changes that happened.

SUMIV FREE
This isn't really cut content, as such, but I correctly decided to drop giving this any further dev time. In one of my worst productivity decisions of the jam (and after a few glasses of wine and watching a certain Delayed Input) I decided it'd be funny to add  a hidden Ski Free clone in the menu system I'd been working on. I actually got pretty far before the regret fully set in. Not much else to say here, just wanted to share my shame on this one..

Credits, Thanks & Inspirations

I want to give a big shout out to the Robot Party community on discord. It's been super inspiring watching everyone's amazing projects come together.

Kyle for his character designs and of course making all of this happen with his collaborative stream ideas.

LittleKittenBit for the great character coloring; their palettes were a ton of fun to work with.

The many YouTube channels such as Brackeys, Code Monkey and WuzzyWizard that were so helpful for learning more about parts of Unity I'd never used before or achieving some of the effects I wanted.

The graphical style of this game was massively inspired by Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor which I recommend checking out for some great vibes!

The BGM used is Lazy Night by 蒲鉾さちこ. They have some really cozy tracks.

And thanks again to everyone in chat. Your response was huge to me.

Changelog

v097 - Added some additional prompts for where to proceed next in the story. Increased max HP a bit and made story progress restore HP.

v096 - Fixed more navmesh issues and enemies potentially ending up in unreachable areas when they switch between navAgent and physics ragdoll modes.

v095 - Finally fully fixed the pathing issue. Enemies weren't adjusting their stopping distance properly based on their current state so certain enemy types were getting stuck when wandering. Likely wouldn't be noticed by most people but it was driving me nuts as I thought it was a collider conflict.

v094 - Removed some debug settings I forgot to turn off and fixed some of the debug menu features that weren't always working as intended.

v093 - Fixed an enemy pathing issue due to a mis-baked navmesh and a few typos.

v092 - Fixed a couple dialogue bugs that were preventing progress. Added a skip to the intro sequence.

v091 - Fixed some minor cursor lock issues on menues and the game over screen.