Devlog 1 - From Darkness Come to Light

Mar 06, 2019

We are Frolic Labs, a small team of developers based in Toronto, Canada. Our current title under development is called 'Dune Sea', a 2.5D scroller adventure game featuring a bird. The team is typically busy working on the game, so it's not often that we get to plug our work to the outside world. This is our attempt to give monthly updates on the game progress, and hopefully we can stick to it.

Humble Beginnings

Dune Sea started as an idea back in 2016, as a small project inspired by games like Journey, Limbo, and side scrollers like Altos Adventure. We wanted to capture the feeling of exploring different types of landscapes while having some platformer like elements. Some ideas were tested but none really finalized. A year later we had a fully realized concept of a 2D endless runner game. While it looked nice, it was very limited: gameplay was repetitive and after 2+ minutes it felt like a there is nothing much to do. At that point, we decided to make it a 2.D scroller adventure instead.

Over the past two years, we had our share of rough patches: team members turnover, concept that evolved to something different and technical challenges that got in the way. The entire code had to get rewritten and core mechanics refined. After regrouping and settling with a new team, things started to look a bit clearer for us. The concept was revised to transform the game from endless runner to an adventure / platformer, or some mashup of the two. With a designer and level builder on board, the game started to take shape.

First Steps

As the lead character in the game, the bird took a large chunk of our efforts. We did try a few different birds, and for now settled for the Goose. Other birds may be coming later on.

Dealing with a bird character proved to be a challenge for both the design and coding of the game. While in endless runner the player moves in a single direction and usually in a constant speed, a platformer style game allows movement in all directions (mostly left and right) while passing through different areas and environments. This turned out to be a complex task to complete.

Learn to Fly

With the current design, the animated character now has to be able to have plenty of different moves, including turning, takeoff, landing and and walking in both directions. Also, going back and forth on a scrolling level is not as simple as going on the same direction: we need to handle proper camera tracking, spawning game elements based on player location and handle game states.

A major goal was to make flying fun by itself. Over the past few months we focused on finalizing the core mechanics and getting it to a state that lets the player fly around more freely with minimal limits. The player controlled bird is able to fly in different speeds, flap, glide, make a u-turn, land and walk on the ground, and takeoff to fly again at will. We even added the ability to honk!

What's next

The production is about to enter early alpha stage. This is a major milestone for us, since it means all the planned features are in place and builds are released for limited play testing.

There are many more features of Dune Sea to show and discuss. We will touch on them in future posts as we go through the production.

Apart from showing the current progress of game in events and collecting feedback, on the next months we will make an effort to expand the content and produce many more levels. Storytelling is very important to us, and some of the work will go towards reshaping the game levels to create the sense of journey and progress from one area to the next. In Addition, we would be ironing out existing features and occasionally adding new ones.