The game · Dev note · 2 min read
Your loadout is the body you wear
The game's central idea. You play a small creature that climbs into shells, and whichever shell it is wearing is what you control.
The idea
Most action games give you a character and then a loadout: weapons, armour and abilities picked from a menu. Ours folds the two together. You are a small living thing with almost nothing of its own. The world is full of shells, some mechanical and some not, and you climb into one. What it can do is what you can do.
Changing your loadout means changing bodies. Lose the shell and you are back to being small, quick and very easy to kill, looking for the next one.
Where it came from
It is a revival of a project one of us started years ago: a ruined coastal city, enemies built out of pipes and machinery, and a creature that survives by borrowing bodies. The first version of this build was a 2D side-scroller. It is now isometric and 3D. The idea came through that move intact, which is a decent sign it was the right thing to keep.
What it asks of everything else
Every shell has to be worth choosing and worth losing. If one shell is simply better, the choice is gone. If losing a shell is only a penalty, people play scared. So each shell is built around one clear job, and being without a shell has to be a way of playing in its own right.
What we can show
These are frames from the art for the trailer. The trailer itself comes next.