Happy Holidays, Ya Filthy Animals

Happy Holidays, Scrumlords! We at Ginger Bean Interactive you're all doing well. This year has been a doozy for the games industry. Thousands of layoffs, dozens of cancelled projects, and the official death of E3 (PBUI). Luckily, GBI is a pioneer of workplace efficiency and budgetary min-maxing, and has only had one paid employee over the last 12 months.

That's me!

Meet Your Dev

My name is Joe and I'm the only person working for GBI. Worry not though, for even though there is only one of me, we've made a lot of progress on the upcoming rework and are excited to share some details about the upcoming content. But before we get into it, thank you all so much for giving this dumb lil game a chance. Merry Christmas, happy holidays, and a happy new year to each and every one of you.

The Campaign Rework

As stated in previous updates, Scrumlords is in the process of having it's "campaigns" reworked. Here are some of the biggest changes coming in the near future.

A Whole New Engine

Speaking of doozies in the gaming community, Unity Engine. After the infamous changes to Unity's terms of service, we immediately began researching alternative engines for making SCRUMLORDS. We finally settled on Godot, a free and open source game engine which fit our studio's requirements and was reasonably easy to learn.

Now, switching to a new engine is not as simple as copying and pasting project files from one place to another. It feels much more like rebuilding the game from the ground up. Please trust me when I say that for SCRUMLORDS, this is a good thing.

The original Unity build was an absolute nightmare. This was my first real game project, and the game's source code was a hard-coded, spaghettified, unscaleable, unupdatable pile of doo doo (I lied on my resume about my CS degree). Remaking the game has let me undo some of the mistakes made in the first build, and should make it easier to us to add new content in future updates.

The Campaign Map

The campaign map is the space that players will enter between each "level." The map will feature branching paths as well as multiple different level types such as combat, shops, random events, and more.

In trying to remove players from static boring menus, the player will physically inhabit the map and interact with the various "nodes" along its paths. Peep this WIP Campaign Map scene:

The "Hub World" where players purchase upgrades and choose their equipment is receiving a similar treatment. Here's some more WIP GIF action:

A NEW ITEMS SYSTEM

Players will be able to earn items throughout their various campaigns. The items only last for the duration of a single run, but the buffs and debuffs they provide can be game-changing! Here's a look at the items we've got (so far):

Final Thoughts

Thank you all again, and again, and again for playing. I'm a uni student, so news has been sparse over the last semester, but with the holiday break, I've got lots of time to dive in and feel like I am making good progress. Check back in the following weeks for more info and the expected release date for the campaign rework.