Shipwreck'd GameDev Week 1: A New Beginning

Hi everyone, welcome to the first gamedev blogpost for Shipwreck'd, our upcoming VR party game! The current game plan is to post a simple gamedev update every week, with a minor milestone blog every 2 weeks.

Now, I'm sure that you're all wondering what it's about. So, let's get you acquainted!

In Shipwreck'd, a motley crew of pirates find themselves marooned on a fabled island of treasure, La Isla de los Mona, after a terrible storm. Scouring the island for resources, the adventurers try their best to piece their ship back together and escape. However, they soon find that the island is haunted by the undead legend himself, Davy Jones!

Play as a pirate with up to 3 other friends on your mobile phone to fight off Davy's forces, collect materials, and sail away, or don a VR headset and wreak havoc on the tiny intruders as Davy! With many classes to choose from for both the pirates and Davy, you can expect fun and engaging gameplay that'll keep you coming back for more!

There's simply no telling if our crew of misfits will escape, or remain...Shipwreck'd!

Now, doesn't that sound FUN?

However, gamedev isn't just about snapping your fingers and making assets appear. So, let's see what we've been hard at doing for the past week!

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Concept Art

Barrels! Trees! Rocks! How exciting! The world of Shipwreck'd is slowly being built from the ground up. Here's Renfred, our lead concept artist for the project, to talk about what happened this week.

Renfred: Here are some simple designs for parts of our environment. We have the vegetation, rocks and some containers and ropes. We have created our own rock creation shadergraph as well in Unity

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3D Models

Of course, we can't just throw 2D concept art into our 3D game. Davier's been working his magic to add an extra dimension to our environmental props, here's what he's got to say.

Davier: So I've been working closely with Renfred to bring his ideas to life. This week I made the palm tree trunk and leaves, fern, crates, barrels, and ropes. The UVs for all of these props are done as well. All these will be used to populate the world.

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Programming

We don't have much to visually show for this week, but Mervin's been hard at work with getting our networking to work! Let's hear from the programming whiz himself.

Mervin:

added basic camera movement and movement scripts , added some photon network programming , being able to create and join a room

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Branding

This week being the soft launch of the studio meant that we needed to be known. Branding is an integral part of all companies and studios, with Golden Monkey Studios being no exception. Joses led the charge this week with a series of vector art stills.

Joses: Aside from our logo, this week I also developed a few monkey personas for the 4 of us, each reflecting either our personality and/or our job scope. We debuted these icons with the site (which you've no doubt seen).

Joses: I also came up with a few other supplementary pieces to give the site (and our future social endeavours) more life.

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That's it for week 1! We've taken baby steps towards the realisation of this amazing game and we're going to keep striving for that. We're so excited to bring you on this journey with us! We hope that this gamedev log will give you some insight into the effort and attention we're giving this project, and inspire any other aspiring game makers.

So, what's next? From here, we'll be pushing out more updates on a more informal basis, depending on the progress of each team member. You'll still be getting our weekly updates on the game, though they'll be a lot more brief.

You'll hear more from us soon, watch this space!