Beacon
No, not bacon. Beacon.
“A beacon is an intentionally conspicuous device designed to attract attention to a specific location.”
If you haven't noticed already, I like designing quirky characters. Oddballs who end up being the hero of a story. Tabby the tablet faced ninja, Mighty Goose the elite bounty hunter, Scubabear, the bear that.. Well, scuba dives. I wouldn’t be able to make a story with ‘just’ guy-with-sword as the protagonist. That sounds dreadfully boring, and actually it is dreadfully boring.
Not to say that I’ve discovered the holy grail of character design. I mostly just look at everyday life objects and figure: What if that was a game hero? It’s hardly an exciting formula, but it does require you to use your imagination. The result is often a bit weird and quirky, exactly what I like.
Let’s talk about one of those quirky heroes. A hero that almost took the place of Mighty Goose as my main project.
This is Beacon. Beacon is a lightbulb in a space suit. This little lightbulb fella was found discarded somewhere and given a home by a group of space pirates. Forever grateful, Beacon is now a true member of the team and has earned the title of space pirate himself.
Oh man, a group of space pirates that flies through the universe and has epic adventures! Now I’m getting excited to make this into a game. The idea was to make this into a proper Metroidvania.
Let the adventure begin!
Fueled by the allure of a great potential adventure, I had already begun programming some of the game systems. What if the crew crashed on an alien world while escaping from a big heist? What if the game started in a big pirate city? These thoughts ran through my head while I was fleshing out the action aspect of this adventure.
I planned for an rpg inspired combat system based on weapons. Talent trees for individual weapon types would unlock their full potential through various perks and abilities. The weapons themselves would vary from conventional arms to odd alien artifacts.
Into the freezer
The project was put in the freezer however. At the time I dreamt this all up, I was also hard at work on another Metroidvania game, KUNAI. I figured there would definitely be a conflict of interest between Blastmode and TurtleBlaze. It would be better to put my Metroidvania ideas in KUNAI and pick another genre for the first Blastmode game.
So Beacon is on hold until further notice. It might return someday, but there’s also a big chance it won’t. One thing is for sure though, there will be a Metroidvania under Blastmode at some point. I love the genre too much and you can bet I’ll add a ton of rpg inspired mechanics as well.
The Axe or Scythe is a boomerang style weapon which basically acts like Thors' hammer from marvel. You can throw it and hold the attack button to make it fly back towards you.
A vehicle system was quickly prototyped, because it's cool. (Oh and, I'm sure I've seen those coins somewhere else ;p)
The 'Hive Meteor' is a kind of weird spin on the summoner trope. Send a swarm of small creatures to attack your foes!
Playable Prototype
It's been a while since I uploaded anything playable for you peeps, so I reckoned you deserved at least something to play around with. This prototype is fairly bare bones and doesn't have much content. I mostly just uploaded it to complement the story! 🙂
You can play around with the weapons a bit, but that's it! It does have some neat little details though: Reverb and low-pass audio system for in caves & underwater, Water physics, A w.i.p. Ring menu for weapon selection, and a few more minor things.
A controller is definitely recommended. Also playable with keyboard but vehicles can't be entered without a controller. :p
Itch.io build
password: AFQv27q8ZKZH2k3
