Hello and welcome to our first devlog of 9 Dystricts, with the purpose of giving an overview of the current state, as well as roughly the steps we (Martin and Richard) have taken so far.

Origin

Our journey started in May 2023 when we took part in the GameDevTV Gamejam with the theme "Dimensions". Over the course of 10 days we accomplished a functional 3D game made in Unity. We named it Recall Dimensions, although the "dimension" aspect was not that important to us, so we changed the name after the jam was over. As we already had some experience working together (we participated the year before as well) we managed to work together well, by strictly splitting our tasks.

Martin: Programming

Richard / RLP: Graphics (3D, UI)

We were really happy about the result (Top 3% in 3 categories), so we decided to take our game a step further and turn it into our first commercial release.

Road to Vienna

From early Summer 2023 until October we completely revamped the first three districts and bosses as well as the core gameplay. We wanted to exhibit 9 Dystricts in Graz as well as Vienna, for Martin it was the first game conference experience which he handled really well.

We also had never met before in real life, although we were friends online for roughly 12 years and worked together on some other projects before, so it was a great opportunity to meet and travel a bit around Styria and Vienna.

So we reworked and fleshed out our game.

City buildings initially were simple geometric shapes without windows for the most part and gameplay was, while working at the start, quite noticeably buggy towards the end of the game.

We got a lot done while learning more about Unity, Blender and Git and crunched quite a bit to get something we are proud of.

In general the feedback we received was very useful and we realised there is still much to do. We are trying hard not to overscope, but development time will be longer than we planned in 2023.

Crash. Continue

Game development, while exciting and fulfilling, is also very hard work. From December 2023 to February we took a break, because in real life things were not working as planned and dragged us down a bit.

Currently we are going all in on ship customization and the hangar menu. This will be a mighty feature that we decided to add after the exhibition was over.

9 Dystricts as gamejam version was more a survivorlike than it is now, because new features will make the experience more unique.

What next?

In our next Devlog we will go into more detail of the customization options regarding the player ship and why this is one of the biggest and most unique features of the game. I will also talk about the core game loop and replayability.

Thank you for reading and stay tuned.

-Richard | RLP | PuriSoft (whatever works for you)