What is Shifter?

Shifter. What is it?

Shifter is a roguelite game, that I have been developing alone for a little over 1,5 years. It didn't start out as a roguelite game though. This is how the project started out: I was randomly just sitting on my bed one day in 2020, and I got an idea. The idea was that it would be cool if there was a game, where you could shift the direction of gravity. I thought about how incredible this kind of mechanic would be in combat. My first idea was to implement it into a 3D first person shooter game, so I hopped out of the bed and opened up my computer, and started a new empty Unity-project.

It didn't take me long to make a small prototype with a working mutliplayer (The multiplayer was very very bad). I played with my friends and we had a lot of fun, but there were alot of problems. First of all the first person perspective didn't work very well with the gravity shifting mechanic, because it was very confusing when the player actually used the shifting mechanic. Second of all I had never made any kind of multiplayer project, so later I decided, that the game isn't going to be mutliplayer, and I'm going to focus on the singleplayer. I had made a small roguelike game just a few moths before, so I decided to make it into a roguelite.

In the picture above you can see my progress in this game. Nowadays Shifter is a roguelite game where you can shift the direction of gravity and walk on walls. This has been the idea for a very long time and it isn't going to change from that. It's interesting to see how a game can end up as a completely different, than what it was originally meant to be. I think the picture above sums that up pretty well.