In a sentence, MULTI-TECH is a rogue-like bullet hell vidja game where you play as a dude on a scrappy, self-built spacecraft that you have to fix, upgrade and build yourself.

In my mind, it's kind of a fusion between FTL and Enter The Gungeon, even though I'm taking some fairly large design liberties with each of them. I'm basically using Enter The Gungeon as a reference point for game juice and FTL because you can upgrade your ship. Kind of a loose comparison in retrospect but I'll have these games in mind during development so I might as well put it out there.

As I'm sure you can see judging by the B-roll that I've got playing here, not a lot's really happening on-screen. That's because I only started working on this game at all on Tuesday, and I've put the majority of work into the pixel art for the time being which is miraculously turning out pretty decently so far.

With regard to the player character's ship that you can see at some point in the video footage, I'm not sure if that's gonna stay the same and I highly suspect that it won't. I'll maybe experiment with some player-generated ship design stuff, but that could get complicated kind of fast so I'm not making any promises.

More likely, I'm going to re-make it at some point. I don't want it to look like that for the whole game, at the time of script-writing I've not even done the animations for shooting those bullets yet so it looks kind of boring and flat, but I am kind of aiming for the look that this spaceship was literally built from a rusty barrel and had a few peripherals slapped on like a thruster and a gun.

The idea is that the player will salvage broken tech components, fix them up by combining them or some other system that I've yet to come up with and apply them to the ship. The ship will have 4 "power cores", each of which is able to supply power to one of these tech components, so it could be like a gun upgrade, a shield, something like that.

I should have mentioned before this point that there will hopefully be bosses in this game as long as I can actually make the pixel art for them without it looking weird and bad. When the player has all but won a boss fight, the boss will remain at critically low HP. The camera would zoom in on the ship itself, showing the human player character and prompt them to run between all 4 cores to engage a big ol super-laser-beam to finish off the boss.

This is kind of just a fun way to finish off a battle, but also it helps to reinforce that the player is running a ship all by himself, where most pilots would have a crew of a few people to help him out.

The only real worry I have about this project thus far is that I'm not sure if it's focused on one central element enough. In my mind, the focus is definitely the "combine tech and upgrade your ship" thing, but I'm not sure if that's actually interesting enough, let alone whether it gets overshadowed by other systems and aspects of gameplay.

I should also note that this isn't gonna be small project like Mushroom: The Ruckus, I'm expecting it to be a bit larger than Mass O' Kyzt. Hopefully it won't take longer than 9 months, but if it does then that's fine, since I wasted a lot of time in the dev cycle for Mass O' Kyzt that I feel I've learned to avoid doing. At least after that project, I feel confident that the time I spend working on MULTI-TECH isn't going to be running around in a circle aimlessly.

I've got a much clearer image of what the design is, plus I don't have school now so I'll be working essentially twice as fast as I did on Mass O' Kyzt, possibly even faster than that since school saps a lot of time and energy.

Anyway, I'm super excited about this project and I genuinely think it'll be really good. Thanks for watching and stay tuned for more videos about MULTI-TECH, the next game in the AlexHoratio saga.