Making the Game, Part One
Welcome to the first blog entry at Unfound Productions, where I seek to document the process of developing our first game project, “Twin Cores.” I hope to help inform those who might wonder what goes into making a game. I think that to get into the “what”, I have to explain why I want to make this game. It’s hard to inform the “how” or the “what” before covering the “why” of it all. So — why make Twin Cores?
Some early concept art of the player characters’ party taking on a massive Disgraced — our zombies!
By Gabi Vasconcelos
First off, let’s talk about zombies. Zombies are sweet. There’s a reason they’re recurrent in pop culture: it’s okay to blow your annoying next-door neighbor to bits if they rise from the dead, hop that property line, and try to bite you. The first zombies I really encountered were The Flood in Halo: Combat Evolved; an alien parasite borne of the first great stewards of life in the universe, their drive to create and care for new life corrupted into malicious grey-goo that can never seem to be defeated. Cool zombies; terrifying to eight-year-old me, who never made it past The Library until a replay of the game in college. The next series that continued my dive into zombies was Left 4 Dead. The goal of the two Left 4 Dead games was simple — get through the level, don’t spook the Witch unless you’ve got two shotguns aimed at it, fill the Tank with lead, and escape. The zombies are humans in their work clothes, pajamas, wedding dresses, and clown makeup - whatever they were when the virus took over. You deal with them by holding down the trigger in the most dense direction, and once there’s a clear path, run through until you have to stop and clear it again. I spent hours and hours fighting waves of L4D2 zombies with my college dormmates. Zombies are just damn fun to kill, what more can be said?
Alright, then the sweetness of zombies has been established. Let’s talk about magic. Magical combat is sweet. What’s cooler than hucking a fireball at a group of goblins and rolling 8d6? Even though four of your RPG characters have been Stealth Archers, you’ve always wanted to be the Archmage of Winterhold, deep down. Magical combat also deviates from the above, classic formulas often: Iceman from the X-men is as much a frost mage as Jaina or Frozone. Yeah, Thor is much more of a warrior/paladin than a sorcerer, but I’d be hard-pressed to not describe him, in many of his appearances, as anything less than a battlemage. The Sirens of Borderlands? Battlemages. Your level 95 magic character in Runescape? Battlemage. Doomguy? Battlemage. Matilda? Battlemage. “You show me a character in media, I tell you how it is battlemage.” There’s something visceral about forming a globe of fire out of thin air, compressing it, and lobbing it at the aforementioned goblins. Embodying the power of sunlight to raise a fallen companion can change the course of a story. Magic can be big or small; it can manifest physically, or as an energy field that surrounds, penetrates, and binds us together. In its biggest moments, there is little that can be more cinematic, flashy, and powerful.
So now you understand - zombies are sweet, magical combat is sweet, let’s play a game involving hordes of enemies running at us and lob fireballs or psionic shards at them. That’s already out there. Well… that’s great for the Sailor Marses and the Sabrina Spellmans among us. What about the Frozones, Thors, Tophs, and White Mages? Where’s their representation in the “eviscerate relentless hordes of undead creatures” genre? That’s where Twin Cores comes in. The series that inspire this game — Left 4 Dead, Deep Rock Galactic, and Warhammer: Vermintide — all lack one aspect that I didn’t realize bothered me until I played all three, culminating in Vermintide. Where’s the customization? Coach is as much a vehicle for the same damn assault rifle that Bill has. Your four classes of Dwarf are just that — four classes of Dwarf. The battlemage of Vermintide 2? A firemage with a staff that is more gun than spellcasting focus, and a spellbook so limited it might as well be a pamphlet. Why don’t these games allow us to build our character from a vast catalog of choices? Why shouldn’t we develop the game that does exactly that?
In Twin Cores, unfathomable demigods from Elsewhere seek to wring the planet Ysod dry of energy, sending their hordes of cold, obsidian-fleshed Disgraced at the only heroes who deign to stand in their way. I choose to socket my Mace with an Air Core and a Fire Core, and thus my title is “The Ashen Judge”. My three friends make their Affinity and Weapon choices; they are “The Spear of Genesis”, “The Essence Cleaver”, and “The Tempest Sage”. We are the party that stands to fight our way through the Disgraced and their hosts, the Voices of Else. Interested in playing a customizable battlemage-focused team-based zombie-horde-blaster ? So are we.
