From Flawless to Maybot Run to VR & Beyond

The prototype for The Flawless: Art’s Tale has been complete for a while now. We’ve been busy grafting away on other projects. A hilarious political infinite runner, a cyberpunk 2d shooter, and a dystopian VR game. Here’s how things are progressing.

We finished our prototype build of our sidescrolling RPG adventure indie game, The Flawless: Art’s Tale a while ago. We recently tested it with a small group of friends and developers and the reaction was great. The prototype section of the game plays well and the gameplay feels quite unique but there are a few thing we’ll need to work on. The story is epic and should fuel a game that requires loads of exploration and allows for lots of dynamic plot changing choices. All that said we have not been working on The Flawless for some time now. We’ve been hectic moving country and grafting away on a few other games for other studios as well as a few prototypes for future games.

The Flawless: Art’s Tale – ‘The Cat King’s Mask’

 

What are these ‘other’ games?

Maybot Run:

Bloodline Games asked us to give them a hand developing a game for PC (Steam & Itch.io), Mac, and Android (Google Play). They said it was politically motivated. Trying to show problems with the current UK government and the class divide in the UK in a funny satirical way. As soon as they told us that the art style was influenced by Viz comics, David FirthSpitting Image, and Monkey Dust we jumped at the chance. The game is called Maybot Run and is a ridiculous, hilarious, often surreal infinite runner with some quite deep gameplay for the genre. You play as Maybot and have to run, jump, slide, and shoot your way to dystopia. You collect taxes, steal wheat to build up you naughty meter and become your ultimate form. Votes can be collected in the game and used to unlock upgrades and new characters. The game is out now on Steam.

Maybot Run by Bloodline Games Trailer (gameplay)

The Last Pilot:

The Last Pilot is a cyberpunk 2d shooter set in the same world of cats (Typha) as The Flawless: Art’s Tale. The game is a blend of the top down shooter genre and the sh’mup genre. Think Hotline Miami meets R-Type. In the top down sections the player can walk around giant airships talking to other characters, shooting enemies, collecting loot, and fighting bosses. The player can then jump into their plane and take to the skies frantically shooting down baddies, collecting power ups, and battling massive aerial bosses. It will tell a story from the world’s history explaining events before Art ever travelled to Typha and became The Flawless hero. The game started life as a number of mini games for The Flawless: Art’s Tale that merged together to become a really interesting indie game in its own right.

The last pilot blasts down some aerial enemies at night

VR Project:

This project is in its early stages so we can’t give too much away yet. What I can tell you is it deals with some interesting themes. Themes of mass unemployment, over population, a lack of jobs, and the use of AI and technology to replace human workers. The game will have a number of possible paths and endings with player choices really affecting the story. The game is influenced by indie games like ‘Papers Please‘ and ‘Please, Don’t Touch Anything‘. It will initially be released for the HTC Vive on Steam with possible future releases on Oculus and PlayStation VR. It may be a while before we have more information on this project as the Maybot Run and The Last Pilot are taking priority.

So why not just polish and release The Flawless?

The prototype was only a small section of the game. In it we tested most of the gameplay, the day/night cycle, and weather systems. Most of the story, characters, areas, and baddies were missing from the prototype. They only exist drawn in our mass of notebooks. We have learnt a lot from the prototyping phase. We want to make the game the best it can be and for it to run every system optimally. This will take time, we are going to re-think the art style, keeping the monochrome kid’s drawing inspired basis, but expanding on it to allow more fluid animations, transitions, and more spectacular effects. We are going to rewrite much of the code using what we have learnt in the prototyping phase. We will start integrating the sound track Electric Fan Death has been working on. Finally, we will start to build the world based on the designs we made in the prototyping phase. The road ahead for The Flawless is so long for such a small team. This is why we have decided to release a few other smaller games first.

Hero Art meets a freaky stitch-eye in the moonlight but whats through that weird door?

Where have you been?

If you’re wondering why we’ve been quiet on the blogging and updates side here is a short explanation. Firstly I got promotion in my day job which ended up being a huge burden taking up all my time. Tony has been doing a Masters degree which has taken up most of her time for the past couple of years. We’ve moved country which has been quiet stressful. Its taking a while for us to settle into the UK way of life. Hopefully now as Tony reaches the end of her dissertation and I have left the time hungry day job we can get back to some serious game development and blogging.

Keep tuned for updates on all our projects. If you enjoyed reading this article and are interested in our game development not keep up to date with all our indie games by following us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Google+.

 

#flawlessthegame #TheLastPilot #MaybotRun #indiegames #VR 

 

Ste Wilson is a director, game developer, and programmer at Bare Knuckle Development Ltd. When not coding away on BKD games he can be found playing video games on console and PC. He also makes music under the music maker name of ‘Electric Fan Death’ and loves playing guitar, writing tunes, and producing music.

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