Heyyo, I am CraftedCircuitry.

Welcome to my very first to-be-released game, Deep Dark Wrath. It’s been a good few months since the start of the game and I’m confident enough to put up my progress so far on the game.

It all started when I was not playing Monster Hunter World:Iceborne. I would usually boot up the game to play a couple rounds of Elder Dragon events, but I wanted to get that feeling on-the-go. I had game ideas for a boss rush and other tons-of-monsters gameplay, but I never really settled on them, and thus never really started/finished any of them.

But a certain Minecraft minigame was shown last year, Decked Out 2 by TangoTek. And I instantly had a thought of what the gameplay loop of my game could be. Decked Out 2 had roughly the same feeling as I wanted in my game. So after a few weeks of thinking, I finally settled on something I want to make and somewhat proud of what it is.

*Getting better and better as you memorized the maps, entities, and objects, but with a progression system that let you go further and further beyond. *

It’s very casual and doesn’t have too much of a focus on story, but it hit all the notes I’ve been wanting to make for this game. And yes, it will have an Android release later on. Just wanna make sure to polish the PC release so that it should be smooth sailing when I export to other platforms.

I also had one big rule for this game. I want to make as much of the assets in-house, or basically, myself. Very, very hard to do, especially for the things I am not good at or have literally no experience, but this is gonna be a learning experience.

v0.1

The prototyping and making the mechanics of the game. This phase took a LONG while as I went ahead and did all of the mechanics first before starting to fully level design. Starting from the entities like the Player and the first enemy, the Skeleton, and moving along to the objects and interactables that the player may encounter.

This phase also had a lot of brainstorming and looking up other various dungeon crawlers to get the inspirations going. Exanima was a big one, and is a big inspiration for the future feel of the game. I also had other inspirations like the limited Regen of Code Vein.

I also did the HUD of the game in this phase. I wanted to keep the main HUD always clean and simple, just the important things when it is needed. I also went and gone for pressure plates for various functionalities like the Inventory and the Library(which is where the player can see more information about the game). A little quirky and kind of tedious, but we’ll see if I have to change it or maybe add a few more places to access certain functionalities.

After all of that, designing and making the assets came after, which was still a big vague mystery. But after a few weeks of brainstorming again and just trying out ideas, I finally got all of the levels done, tilemaps, enemies, and objects populated.

v0.2

One of the biggest progress updates so far is the ambience of the game. One of the bigger inspirations I used was Exanima. I really liked the dark, dungeon feels it gave so I tried to emulate it onto the game. However, it became very dark across the map, so I slowly and lightly added lights around the map to help it not be too dark.

This is also the progress update where I started finalizing the vertical slice of the Demo. Very late into production, I know, but with the game having a small scope, I wasn’t sure where to really put the end of it. I finally got a good grasp of it, so that the game isn’t fully complete in the Demo but the players have a good enough idea of what to be doing when the Full Version is released.

Sounds also came into this progress update. My biggest task is definitely doing a full Background Track for the game, as I have 0 experience doing full composing. With the mostly in-house restriction, this is a tough one but I’ll do my best to really translate how I want the player to feel in the game with the music.

This was also the time I started getting ready for future release. This page has been in the forge for a while, and is now out and ready for the world to see. I’m starting to get some footage for the trailer and mapping out how it should go about.

The Future

Anyways, for the most part, the game production is running smoothly and I should hit my target deadlines comfortably(unless something game-breaking happens). The Free Demo should be out very soon for all of you to try out.

Thank you very much for checking out this game. This has been CraftedCircuitry, signing off for now.