Development Update Mar-May 2024

Time has flown by and although it’s been a quiet few months with fewer updates, our team has been working a lot in the background especially on the game design and programming side, getting the mechanics polished and tightened up so we can create a fun, cohesive and excellent experience for all of you!

Here’s a summary of our work and achievements since March in one BIG update!

Game Mechanics

So far, our team has completed 10 prototyping sprints this year. A sprint is a short, focused period where different design elements are prototyped, tested out and validated before further work is done to incorporate them into the game.

Through this process, our development team has iterated on the dialogue system, discovery and meta loop, traversal, time, stealth and combat elements of our game.

Yes, you read it right – we’ve experimenting with non-lethal combat mechanics. What do you think about that?

Lots of new mechanics have been tested in the past months, and we’re looking forward to revealing more once we’re ready to! We’ve been conducting rounds of playtesting among members of our community, and we’re getting closer to the result!

Art

We’ve made a lot of progress on the art front in recent months. One big milestone we’ve reached is that we’ve now completed concept art of the Capernaum rich district, residential district and Simon Peter’s house, and we’re now moving on to designing landmarks.

Concept Art: Capernaum Residential District

Concept Art: Capernaum Rich District

Concept Art: Capernaum Rich District

Concept Art: Simon Peter's House

Concept Art: Simon Peter's House

We’ve also started implementing the Capernaum rich district buildings into the game world. Check out an early look below!

To prepare for further world-building, we’ve been developing a modular system for buildings, structures, materials and textures to have centralized control over the art, improve efficiency and optimize memory and performance.

Aside from buildings, we’ve also been working closely with our history consultants to develop a solid basis for 1st century characters and clothing as we begin to create concept art for the crowd.

Concept Art: Jewish Rich Male

Concept Art: Jewish Regular Female

Concept Art: Fisherman

Another thing we’ve been prototyping that we haven’t shown much of yet are World State Effects – alternative renderings to the normal world that indicate a different state the player is in. The world effects are connected to the time travel element of our game and bring yet another exciting dimension to gameplay.

Concept Art: Time World

Concept Art: Corrupted World

Research

In the past months, we have established a tight, solid collaboration and workflow with our history consultants. Their insight and research is invaluable to the game we are creating, and we are constantly in awe over the rich depth there is to the Bible’s stories both from a historical and archaeological standpoint.

Besides offering input to ensure historical accuracy, we’ve experienced that the amazing teamwork we’ve got going with these historians extends beyond getting the facts right. Knowledge of archaeology and history can also add fun elements to the game’s design and mechanics, for example with the addition of maps, artifacts, caves and environmental obstacles, as well as daily-life habits and tasks of the locals.

Research board of characters and clothing

Research board of various elements in 1st century Capernaum

Team Updates & Office Fun

As development progresses, we have also been actively hiring to recruit the necessary talent to complete the game. New additions to the team include a game designer, associate producer, technical artist, texture artist, two level designers, and most recently, a senior game designer.

As our remote team grows, we’ve found different ways to collaborate and communicate. We now work together in a virtual office using Gather Town.

Some fun on the office Slack chat

Events

Game Developers Conference 2024

In March, we brought a Gate Zero booth for the first time to the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. We received overwhelmingly positive feedback and met many awesome people genuinely interested in what we are doing!

Read the full GDC report and see the pictures here

Marketing

In March, we hit an exciting milestone: 500,000 followers across all social media platforms and 50M combined views! We are overwhelmed with the attention Gate Zero is getting, and humbled and motivated to keep working hard. Thank you SO much for all your continued support and encouragement!

And with that, we leave you with an awesome piece of fan art created by VoxVulpes from our Discord community.

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