Poof! Devlog #01

Welcome to our first ever devlog! We’re Ex Anima Games, a small team of 8 geeks who have been learning game dev in our spare time, with the goal of building games that breathe new life into our favorite genres. Essentially making games with soul, which is our studio’s namesake!

We're excited to introduce Poof! — a game we've been heads-down experimenting with for the past two years and can't wait to share with all of you. This first devlog will be a rundown of the whole game so far, but we will get into the details of each system as well as our progress on the game in future devlogs!

Poof! started as a weekend game jam project that brought us together. We landed on a last-stand game with a twist: hacking and slashing isn’t enough, you have to backstab enemies to survive.

There was an element missing though, because the theme of the gamejam was “Escape” and not just survival. That’s where we were inspired to pivot our concept to balancing fighting hordes of enemies while trying to escape the current level.

Core Gameplay

After the gamejam, we needed to figure out how to put all the pieces together from our concept:

• Backstabbing to insta-kill

• Escape Mechanics

• Waves of enemies

We are also fans of roguelikes and love the idea of being able to add our twist to the genre which made it the perfect framework to bring everything together.

After a lot of experimenting we combined the best of roguelike elements with escape strategy, having players fight waves of enemies to defend the tech that can get them back home while completing objectives around the map. The best comparison we can make is Hades meets Dead by Daylight.

AND our own special layer on top: while you can kill enemies normally, backstabbing enemies will Poof them! Poofing enemies will give you a guaranteed Soul Token reward – that you can then use to buy our version of boons/power-ups, the Fates.

The tricky part was making sure that Poofing didn’t gate player power too much and was not limiting our ability to make different Fate types. But that said, we’ve reached gameplay that has been pretty fun and satisfying.

In true roguelike fashion, if you die then your run ends and you have to start over again at 0.

Characters

Our goal is to launch Poof! with four distinct characters, each with unique baseline playstyles and traits.

Skelly is our first main character! He is a generalist with mid attack reach and has the ability to do targeted attacks or wider sweeping attacks. Starting with Skelly meant we could establish a clean baseline for all the mechanics and discover what design space we had with each element for our Fates system.

We’ve also started exploring ideas for other characters based on what we’ve learned so far.

Maps

We wanted our maps to deliver on the classic roguelike experience, where maps are procedurally generated and are a key driver of gameplay difficulty and strategy.

After a lot of testing, we found that fully procedural maps in 3D are not only difficult, they also do not make for the best experience. This was because we couldn’t easily control the loops and challenges that appeared on the map per level as well. BUT we didn’t give up on the idea of making maps change every run though, so we built tech that let us build pieces of the map that could then be combined to create many different variations of the map. This means we can do hand curated generation while still giving players a different experience every run AND as the level increases.

We're also designing each map to have a unique identity and introduce new challenges that shake up the way you play. Some of the elements we’re playing with are: how easy it is to traverse the map, what hazards appear on the map, possible locations for objectives and many more.

The map we’ve revealed so far and can be seen in our posts is Wildgrove! This is our starter map, the first place players will arrive when they enter gameplay. Wildgrove is intentionally less complex at earlier levels so that players can focus more on getting used to combat and pacing and start building their player power. Like Skelly, Wildgrove also acted as our baseline to play with mechanics and see what design space we have. Our next step with Wildgrove is playing with what elements we can add or tweak to spice things up at higher levels.

We're still working on the art style for the maps so the aesthetic above still work in progress. In the meantime here is the concept for WIldgrove's visuals we're working towards!

The second map we’re working on is code-named “Dustveil”. We’ll reveal more about this map soon, but our goal with it is to create a map that heavily plays with the time it takes to travel from one point to another.

Here’s a very early stage sneak peek into what we’re doing with Dustveil:

Story

There’s not too much we can talk about the story since we want to avoid spoilers, but we can talk a bit about the system behind the story.

You might be wondering why we’re including story in a roguelike and that’s simply because weeeeeeee are lore nuts and love a good story campaign. That said, we are building Poof! in a way where the story progresses with you as you do runs and gain achievements so that the core gameplay stays true to the roguelike style. The further you progress in the story, the more variety you can unlock in your runs as well, like enemies and bosses.

We also have two worlds, Nullros and Omega-326. The idea behind this is that, we can allow for both story progress and roguelike gameplay while also being able to have double the world lore and a unique story flow. On Nullros you will get the complete campaign experience (with some moments leading into Omega) and on Omega you get World Lore as you get random versions of the map that would have lore bits.

Co-op & Offline

When we thought about playing Poof! we imagined just being able to hop on a couch with a friend and going for runs to see how far we can get. So co-op was a natural step in making Poof! and we built the game from the ground up with co-op in mind so far.

Our plan is to support 1-4 players with online co-op or LAN and 1-2 player couch co-op, and solo offline. We want players to be able to play Poof! no matter what – even if servers are down or you are on the go. We even want players to be able to hop in couch co-op online and hop in with 2 of their friends who are playing from home.

We know this was a long read, and we appreciate you for sticking through this first devlog!

This is just the beginning. We'll be doing deep dives into our maps, characters, enemies and more as we continue building Poof! Make sure to follow along for more devlogs!