This was a long, complicated, tedious, original and a enjoyable development for me. It was the team’s main game and was developed for 1 year until it was released as a demo or MVP on Itchio.
Total Blackout (TB) is a roguelike-style game about killing robots in a technological dystopian society, where the real and digital come together. The world is controlled by an AI and the life of the citizens is hell. You fight with a partner with whom you can shoot from a distance and you have 3 melee attacks. Like almost all roguelike every time you start the map is generated randomly along with its upgrades, which are obtained by filling some dispensers with metabits (money), these are obtained by killing robots or looking for boxes containing them. The level ends when you fill in the main dispenser and move on to the next level.
There are diferent tipes of dispensers: ones gives you a new weapon, other gives an upgrade for a obtained weapon, others pasives and pasives upgrades.
I will summarize the playable loop in a simple way so that it is understood fast: You start the level -> fill some dispensers killing robots -> these give you upgrades -> active a main dispenser -> when you complete it, you pass to the next level. There is a codex that gathers the improvements you have obtained, accessible from the menu with which you can see what you have obtained in previous runs.
I have done everything in this project : All weapons, types of explosion and projectiles, 95% of improvements and effects, IAs of enemies, implementation of VFX, dynamic music... The number of systems running simultaneously is spectacular. Weapons, projectiles, alert level, effects, surges, upgrades, AI, navigation, states, UI. Seriously, look for yourself in the trailer and it will be understood quickly.