Fley Digital with their crazy-action-party-game
US
For now, we are a small team of four game developers, but it took a while to get to this point.
We have all gone through mainly the same steps in our game developer journey. We all started our studies at TUAS. Others started on the game track right away, one of us took a little detour but ended up working in games anyway. We have all worked on game related stuff for a couple years now, after graduating mostly, but some of us did it on the side during the studies as well.
But what really brought us together was attending game jams. Jams can be hectic and chaotic, but finding the golden thread and following that with a team makes the experience absolutely worth it, and you get so much out of that short experience. Of course we always had other members in jams as well, but this quartet was something that stuck on.
Our GGJ2020 game, drunkenly fight your friends in a true finnish fashion. (we had other members with us)
Two of us had been throwing some game ideas around and started testing the waters. It was mostly one designing / being lazy and another one typing in some magic on the screen and suddenly there was something that kinda reminded us of a game. We iterated on the idea until there was nothing left of the original and the project we are working on right now was there.
So, we had a coder and a 3D artist. Why not bring in the whole quartet and add in a 2D artist and a Character artist? Between the four of us, we had a perfect combination of different skills and interests and the team suddenly popped into existence.
So now it’s us, Juuso, Sami, Antta and Antti working on WALLBANGERS and making it our first stab into the industry as a team.
GAME
What had started as a top-down shooter, where your characters can move by jumping from wall to wall, ended up being a twin-stick shooter where your bullets play the main role. Shooting through walls and making your bullets bounce from different surfaces felt like a really nice game mechanic for us. I don’t know what it is, but seems like we have a thing for walls.
Our current WALLBANGERS look, you just need to pretend it’s a moving image
The more things we added, the more adjustment we did, combining ideas and opinions from everyone on the team, the game started taking shape and moved more away from precise shooter to more of a crazy-action-party-game.
With the combination of different characters, abilities and weapons we have, if you just take a quick glance at the screen, you probably won't understand a lot of what is going on. However, if you keep watching for a while, you might start to see the mechanics in action. What looks like chaos and mayhem, has a surprising amount of strategy involved.
As we now continue development, we have turned our focus on finishing a demo of the game. With the demo we hope to do some extended testing and get some valuable feedback on our current state. Our main focus is still in readability and making the game feel even more snappy and smooth to play.
In the future we also want to use the demo to reach out to publishers. As we are first timers, the help with porting from our PC version to consoles and proper localization is something we would welcome the help.
CHECK US OUT
You might see that we have been focusing our time on the game, not on the website development.
Later on this will be our one stop to get connected with us, now it only has the absolute minimals.
Written by Juuso Salminen