Gate Project

New Momentum Building UpIt's been silent for a while around the Gate Project, but that wasn't a bad thing. It was a time of a lot of testing, reflection and rethinking how to proceed with this project. Always keeping in mind the end goal: a full game release.T…

Demo Released, Feedback Welcomed! Announced and delivered, a key milestone for my very first game dev project. Even if it's no Balatro or R.E.P.O., still proud that I made it that far. Now it's time to see, how the overall feedback and response will be. Thing …

Main Goal: Demo The demo release remains the main goal #1. At the moment, QA is undergoing in full speed. After a dozen demo builds or so, less and less bugs are found - which hopefully means, that indeed there are not that many left. Basic balancing is done f…

Swamp with Updates Actually a good thing: I feel there is so much going on, that I think it makes sense to cut the news a bit, and focus just on the most-interesting things - and just mention the rest briefly. Road to the Demo in March A small and solid playab…

FAQ on Website It is somewhat tricky to explain and showcase the game via pictures and short videos, as it is not a clean "1-genre game". To tackle that, I've setup a FAQ section on the website. Discord Setup Speaking of setup: A Discord server is now up and r…

Wishlists Exploding It's awesome to see, that Gate Project's wishlist count is taking off like a rocket - a great motivator to stay committed to the development and deliver the best possible game and experience! The numbers itself may be "small", but the trend…

Steam RTS-Fest Gate Project appears in the "Upcoming" list - for the popular list, it is of course still some way to go, but hey.... got to start somewhere. In parallel, the Taipei Game Show is running this week, so let's see, what kind of games this week will…

Adding Interactive Objects As part of the out-of-combat work, last week was somewhat sluggish and filled with non-dev occupations, but still managed to make a few interesting additions and progresses. For example added interactive elements, which will have var…

What's upcoming? 2025 has arrived, time flies by and it's time to lay out some battle plans for the upcoming time. Thinking about something like following and will move things as needed - given that it is for now a "1 man wolf pack" project, since it's start i…

Surprisingly lot happened during last week in and out of the core game dev. Short updates below... Dedicated Gate Project Website Opened Lucky find (like with epic loot ːsteamhappyː) was that the domain gate-project.com was still free to be taken. As emergency…

Better animations, better UI, better combat There were improvements on all fronts at a surprising pace - must have to do with the new workflow since last month, pays really off. The UI keeps improving to levels, where it can be considered as robust enough for …

Focus on out-of-combat experience In the HQ there is a lot to do. One of that is to plan your missions in terms of setting the next destination, selecting and equipping your team properly. Unlike last weeks combat features, it is a very UI-heavy and often not …

More Units On The Field Without Chaos "Perfectly balanced, as all things should be" - at least that's the goal, and we're on good terms with it. Got to make sure, that scaling up the combats with more units, abilities and so on does not hurt first and foremost…

Starting with small scale mission maps and setups to make sure, the overall game flow is cohesive and feels right. Already for micro-sized mission maps, the experience has to feel on spot - and it does. It just took the previous weeks' general tweaks and rewor…

Full Internal Unit Behavior Rework It was a large task, which was tried to be avoided with "the old system still works - wonky - but works". But it kept breaking, being sometimes unpredictable and hard to debug, so it had to go. A full revamp of the way, how u…

Stop to drift away It's too easy to get carried away during gamedev a la "let's improve this on the way" or "got a new idea, will immediately implement it, will be quick". Stopping that and will focus on a more planned, disciplined way. That also helps to keep…

Continuous work regarding feeling, pacing and performance A bit less "visual" updates happened, as the focus was more towards gameplay and feeling. That means, reaction times of the units, general behaviour improvements and fixing performance issues, which wer…

The combat-tests were great, and focused on improving not only the feeling and responsiveness of the units, but also ironed out bugs and fully reworked a key element: the unit sensor system. Questions (and answers) from the play-test - Is the combat engaging a…

Currently working on a playable small combat-orientated test arena. It is meant for a basic check of feeling and performance at this stage of the development. Questions, which this playtest shall answer are: - Is the combat engaging and fun? - Is it fluent, st…