Progress on Digitality
Even though we’re not good in actual communication (which we still need to fix), be rest assured that progress on our projects continues steadily. As mentioned in the Project Info post, we are mainly working on Digitality right now.
…but what is Digitality anyway?
Glad you probably didn’t ask! In essence, Digitality is a breakout game very much inspired by Arkanoid,
where your main objective is to clear all stages from bricks. In what we do diverge from Arkanoid though…
Paddle energy
The length of your paddle (which we lovingly call the SC Horizon, btw) is determined by how much energy you have. You’ll start with a variable amount, depending on the difficulty level you chose. With this energy, you’re free to deploy balls at will, whenever you want, how many you want. Each deploy will cost you energy though, and if your energy level is below the minimum required for a deploy, you’ll be unable to spawn new balls. Even worse, if you lose all balls in the field and you don’t have enough energy left, the paddle will explode, and you’ll have to retry the stage. Fail too many times, and you’ll have to restart the chapter.
Destroying bricks, reabsorbing balls, and using certain powers, will allow you to regain energy, and grow the SC Horizon. But even then you’ll have to make sure you don’t store too much energy, as that will cause an overload and automatically deploy balls for a certain amount of time.
Game progression
In the main campaign, you’ll have three different paths to take. At the end of each chapter, you can decide on which path you want to continue on, very much like Outrun. At the end of each path, you’ll be collecting an artifact piece, and only when you collected all three of them you’ll be able to enter the final chapter.
Powers
Just like Arkanoid, Digitality has powers which randomly drop from destroyed bricks. They can either be powerdowns or powerups, also decided at random. However, at the beginning of the game, you’ll be starting with only three types of it. By collecting artifact pieces though, you’ll unlock more powers to have at your disposal; 3 for each artifact, totalling to 12.
There’ll be various types of powers, but I’m sure most of them will look familiar to those who have played other breakouts in the past. However, there are some that are quite interesting, which we’ll keep secret for now.
Cool pitch. So what’s next?
We’re planning to release a demo soon, believe it or not. The biggest blocker right now is the second phase boss, or the boss fought in chapter B and C. We don’t just want Pong-like bosses, or simple bullet sponges (or ball sponges, ha ha), so we want to get this right before we release this for first impressions. Other than that, it’s mostly polishing work. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still lots of content left to make, especially as all chapters past B and C have not been started yet. But, you know, demo, first impression and the like.
Can I download it yet?
Patience, my dear! We won’t actually make a proper release until we think it’s ready for a demo, but starting today, the repository where the game lives is public. You can visit it here, and if you want to build it to take a peek, it’s using Godot 4.4.1 stable. Be aware though, there’s still quite a lot of rough edges which could make it a bad experience.
!
