What happened at Project Ambitious during 2018?
In 2018, we pushed ourselves to create a playable prototype of what Revn will become. We’ve wanted to show our friends and fans what we’ve been working on, and we finally got to do that in October, when we launched our first ever closed alpha.
Revn started with an idea. A game where teams of players both defended and attacked player-built strongholds. This element of creative freedom has influenced many of the design decisions we’ve made. From modular weapon crafting, to a lack of predefined character classes, we’ve wanted to allow players to experiment and find their own playstyles and loadouts.
Most of our efforts in 2018 focused on developing the gameplay mechanics and tools that players will be utilizing in Revn. The core mechanics are stronghold building, gear crafting, and AI minions. Each of these systems went through multiple iterations in 2018.
Refining the building system required us to work on an intuitive user interface, and to fine tune the scale of the objects players place in the world. By the end of the year, the user interface was usable, but still needs work to make it more attractive. The scale of build-able objects has improved quite a bit this year. We have to balance two factors with scale: speed and detail. If objects are too small, it can become frustrating to build within a reasonable amount of time. If the objects are too large, players won’t have enough control over their bases’ design.
The gear crafting system has seen many variations. Most of these changes have affected how players unlock items. We’ve tried a crafting queue, not having gear unlocking, and several other designs, and at this point have decided to use resources to unlock each item. We experimented with hitscan versus projectile based weapons, and decided on projectile based weapons as ideal. I worked on a first-person view for aiming with scopes, shown below.
There have been several new traits added to our weapon crafting system: multi-shot, burst fire, and the cursed wind-up trait that never seems to work perfectly. We added cooldowns to some armor abilities to begin balancing their usage. There are many more abilities and weapon traits planned for Revn, so stay tuned!
We launched the closed alpha without minions because they weren’t as ready as the rest of the mechanics. There is still a lot of work to be done on them, and much of that work has to do with deciding how they will be used in a match. At the very end of 2018, we introduced minions as a rough prototype for our testers to experiment with.
I would like to specially thank all of our alpha testers, especially everyone who responded with feedback and bug reports. We’ve got even more planned for 2019, and we’re glad you’re along for the journey!
Silas Talley, Creative Director
