Welcome from the team behind The Shattering Swords (TSS)! You’ve made it to our Development Blog. On this site, we’ll be making weekly posts, updating anyone here to read them on the progress we made throughout each week.
Let me start off by saying, we’re so happy to have you here. We’re all students at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), pursuing our Master’s Degrees in Game Design and Development. TSS is our Capstone project for our degrees and we’re excited to bring everyone along for the ride that is its development.
At this point, we’ve already been working on this project for around 6 months. We started in February of 2021 with team formation and we’ve been working on brainstorming and refining our ideas since then, adding a few artists along the way, and getting input from a few members of the faculty at RIT so that we knew what we were doing and what we wanted to do made sense. The reason we’re starting the blog up now is partially because we finally have time to do it, but also because we’ve now started on prototype development, and we’ll finally have some tangible progress to show off.
So at this point, you’re probably wondering, just what is this project? Well, TSS is a 3rd-person Action game centered around a real-time weapon-switching combat system. This means that the player will be switching their weapons without the game pausing, making the decision to switch weapons and the decision of which weapon to switch to that much more meaningful and impactful.
The player character is a young adult living in a small village. They’ve learned that a bandit horde is about to descend on their home and, being one of the only able-bodied residents of their village left after forced conscription for a far-away war decimated their population, they’re forced to take up the sacred sword of their village to protect their home.
In the game, the player will fight various members of this bandit horde to collect a total of three gemstones, each giving them access to a new sword with its own abilities and specialties. The swords’ specialties include power, speed, and healing, with the final being a balanced blade that uses one of our mechanics, healing from hitting enemies, as its unique ability. The experience will culminate in a boss fight in which the player will use the skills and abilities they’ve gained to defeat the bandit king in order to finally save their home.
Overall, the project will culminate in a complete experience by graduation at the beginning of May, 2022. This experience will aim to show off what we think is the highlight of our game: its combat system.
And that pretty much wraps up the who, what, when, where, and why of our project. We hope you’ve enjoyed reading about our project so far, and we hope you stick with us through its development. It’s sure to be an interesting ride.