Welcome to the first NecroBouncer devlog! Here I will explain a bit about how this game started and the major things that happened during the development.
I don’t remember exactly, but I think the development started around June 2017. This was and still is just a spare time project, but it has grown from a small hobby to something much bigger.
Hover / click the image to see the past
In the beginning, this started as a mobile game and the idea behind it was: a clicker game, but instead of a clicking mechanic, you go around the dungeon, kill enemies and earn currency that way. That basically removed it from the clicker game genre, but I was still planning to add some sort of upgrade system, that lets you boost your income and also earn currency while you are away. But, the longer I was pursuing this model, the more I realised that I couldn’t make the game fun this way. So little by little, I was removing these clicker elements, replacing them with more “rougelike” ideas and in the end, completely redesigning most systems from the ground up and also, after a lot of thinking, changed the platform to PC/Mac.
This brought with it a huge undertaking of starting from scratch multiple times, and a lot of pain by removing the already built systems that had months of work put into them. But, with that misery, also came huge waves of relief, knowing that I could delete some things that, for a long time, I knew weren’t good for the game. All of this extended the development greatly, because around June 2019, the game was already built so far, that the only thing left was adding content. Most if not all major systems were in place, but the game was still mobile at the time.
At that stage, I decided to contact a publisher, to see if they would be interested in NecroBouncer. My lack of experience, combined with poor preparation, resulted in a very bad “pitch” if I could even call it that. Luckily, I was talking to a very professional person, who said the game looks good and that they might be interested. But the more important thing, I am thankful that he said, is that they have no prior experience or interest in publishing free to play mobile games and if I have ever considered making it for PC and Console. This sentence was the straw that broke the camel’s back and finally pushed me to change the platform. He also kindly reminded me that even if I make a change like that, they still might not be interested in NecroBouncer in the end, but that really didn’t matter to me. I just knew this is something I had to do for the good of the game.
From that point on, there was a lot of revision, refactoring and out with the old, in with the new. This is as far as I am concerned, the actual start of NecroBouncer as it stands today, but even a lot of things, that were made from this point on, were greatly changed in the near future. At least, I was dead set on making the game a roguelike, with a couple of progression mechanics, so a bit more rogue-lite. Although most of those progression systems were removed in the end or reworked to be more random each run, because I always found out that continuous playing makes them boring, since once you figure out the optimal strategy, you would use them in the same way every time.
It took me another 2 years to get to the same point I was with a mobile version, but I am overwhelmingly happy I did it, because the game as it was back then, can’t compare to what it became. It also revived my joy of developing games, because a lot of free-to-play mechanics were weighing me down creatively and the amount of knowledge I got from this extended journey is priceless to me, so this was all definitely worth it!
If you want to know more about the very beginning of this game, you can check out my (inactive) Tumblr blog, where I started posting about developing NecroBouncer. And if you just want to see some old gifs and screenshots, join my Discord server, and you can find them under NECROBOUNCER/#history.
This Post Has 2 Comments
This was an interesting read 🙂
Thank you!
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