The game would consist of three main parts:

1 Various caves and underground areas where a large variety of monsters can be found and captured. These monsters can then be used in various ways depending on the type: some can be weaponized, others can be used to improve weapons, to be used as crafting materials or simply as fuel, to be sold for currency etc.

2 Bosses throwing waves of monsters at you to battle. Winning these challenges can unlock further monsters, grant skill points, unlock further areas of the game and also unlock a higher tier challenge for the same boss.

3 A hub area that has access to the caves, the bosses, some NPCs and also just look cool and help in introducing lore about the game.

I have some work done for all three of these, but right now I would like to mostly talk about the caves and the monster capture part. I have the most done in that area.

Setting

This takes place in the far future where many things are grown instead of being built resulting in various monster-like creations. Monster ARE the technology.

Also all this takes place on a planet divided into 4 quite distinct nations with different paths to creating these monsters. Each different approach has resulted in monsters that adhere to the theme of each faction: robot, horror, fantasy and cartoon. Additionally there is an area on the planet where all 4 factions manage to more or less collaborate in the interest of improving various technologies known as the Testing Fields, which is our hub area and where the game takes place.

Capturing monsters, exploring caves 

Take a look at the short gameplay video I included, I’m basically explaining the game mechanics you can see there.

The caves can be explored by controlling a small drone which has the abilities to capture monsters, navigate narrow passages and to destroy smaller obstacles. Monster are captured by deploying Capture Lines from the drone and hitting a marked weak spot on any given monster. Higher tier monsters need more Capture Lines and also each monster has a movement pattern so capturing might be easy or challenging depending on circumstances. The yellow weakspot on the monster has a different number of pointy bits to indicate how many Lines you will need. For example: skeletal monster on the left needs two Capture Lines, while the mouthy one on the right only needs one. Some monsters need more Lines than you start with.

Monster Behavior

The monsters have fairly simple behavior patterns, but there are many different looks ( right now I have around 40 horror monsters and starting on fantasy ones). Also some monsters are rarer, the locations and specific encounters are somewhat randomized so my hope is that it will be exiting to go and find out what you can find in a new or previously visited part of the caves.

Some monsters also have extra behaviors like the bouncing eyeballs you can see in the video, or these slimy territorial creatures. Each has an area marked as a circle around it, circle getting larger depending on monster tier. If you enter the circle the monster will move to the center of it and then pursue you until you leave their territory or until you loose the drone.

Failing a Capture

You start with 4 Capture Lines and if you use up all 4 without capturing a monster, it will either run away or attack you. It’s all good though, you can try shooting down the monster before it damages the drone too much and try again with another creature. Captured creatures will appear in the pause menu where you can see the monsters name and the tags it has ( I’ve shown this in the vid) and the monster will always be transferred to the Collection Area in the hub/Testing Fields even if the drone is destroyed right after a capture. You can learn more about the monster and how it can be used in there(tags, flavor text, tier, type). Some monsters have evolution lines like the slime creatures above.

Laser Explosion

The Cave Drone you control is also equipped with a Laser Explosion, which can destroy smaller obstacles and damage monsters. However, each time you use it you risk decreasing the Cave Stability, which is another resource besides Cave Drone’s HP which you have to pay attention to.

Drawing a Line Path for the Drone

Very importantly, there is also a way for the Drone to squeeze past various gaps and passages that are normally too narrow or to avoid monsters. You can draw a path starting from the drone and the Drone will follow it while being invulnerable and fitting into narrow gaps. If you’re not careful doing this, you might get stuck and once again reduce Cave Stability or run into monsters.

Caves and Cave Stability

You start in the first cave called the Abandoned Archives. The plan here is to hand craft the entire area, with very few repeating parts. Basically I’m approaching it less as a tileset and more as a painting of the entire level. This means that each cave wont be huge, but it will be dense with various details and encounters and at least to me that seems quite appealing. I tend to get bored of oversized empty levels in games myself and it’s simply fun to design a level like this from my side of things. Also I plan to add some amount of randomly appearing rooms and details, which together with randomized monster encounters should make each run feel different.

The cave is fully stable at the start of a run, but there are a few ways to reduce Cave Stability mentioned above. If the cave stability falls bellow 25 percent, the cave will start to collapse and rocks will start falling possibly damaging the drone. However, game is not lost even if Cave Stability falls to 0, it only ends if the drone is damaged beyond repair and cave stability can potentially be brought back up. Right now I have a resource that can be found that increases cave stability, but I might include other methods as well or maybe make the instability temporary, we’ll see.

Finished part of the cave:

Rocks falling on the drone ( yeah, the falling rocks asset is still a sketch):

Where I’m going with this

So yeah, this is just one of the things I want to talk about the game and I plan to keep updating this devlog as I complete them. I have a million ideas and for me an uncharacteristic amount of enthusiasm for this, the only limiting factor is time. There are also many smaller aspects like a simple story, the reason for capturing these monsters, drone upgrades, skill system for fighting the bosses and other things I haven’t mentioned but already started on, but one thing at a time.

Right now I want to make a fully working demo with two or three caves, a single fancy boss and partially finished hub area and then see how much content I can reasonably add to it before I call it finished. And even a demo is a lot of work, but it continues to be fun making this so hopefully some people like it and give me extra motivation.

Some more monsters I designed – the main reason I decided to make a game like this:

More horror monsters, some fantasy monster sketches

Here are some more horror monsters I finished for the game. All these also have a specific tag "tentacle" in the game. Monsters with specific tags will be suitable tor specific upgrades and such, so I was thinking about using the "tentacle" tag to upgrade the Cave Drone's Line Catchers.

I'm also starting to do more work on the fantasy themed monsters and these are some sketches of Paper Elementals. The cave where these will be found is called the Abandoned Archives, a large part of it has an old library vibe, so I thought this would be a nice theme to go with some of these monsters. In game I plan to call these Paper Stichija, Crumple Stichija, Fold Sichija, or something similar, Stichija just being the Lithuanian word for Elemental.