And so, it begins...

A game has to start somewhere right?

Well, this game was born under a bit of a cloud. We initially registered for a Game Jam, and the initial idea was actually a low-poly tank game would you believe. A week or so before the start of the jam, we had started knocking up some prototype ideas using assets from Synty.com, I think we had their pretty cool War Pack, using the tanks, buildings and FX from that for the majority of our assets.

The prototype was based on an old Amiga 500 game I use to love called Conqueror. I still like the idea of creating an homage to this game, it really was great.

Using the Synty.com assets made life a lot easier than if we had to create them ourselves, we are both programmers, our art, is well, probably, not art lol.

In any case, the biggest technical challenge we had was creating the terrain, we wanted it to be procedural. That included, as well as the terrain topology, the roads and the buildings as well as the flora and fauna. We even had some networking together and we almost had something playable.

We are using the Unity 6 engine, so the terrain was simpler to do using that as we didn’t have to worry about creating the mesh and managing LoD, but getting the procgen to work as we wanted it was great fun to figure out.

Alas, a good few days into this prototype, one of us suffered a major health issue and was rushed to hospital. Then a few more days later, the theme for the Jam dropped, and well, it didn’t really fit our prototype. I know, I know, we really should have waited to see what the theme was before investing so much work into it, but we thought we had a good idea of what the Jam would be, but we were wrong lol.

So, 50% of GnatByte was in hospital (still working on the project I hasten to add, it’s hard to keep these old games programmers down), and the prototype not really fitting the theme, we made an executive decision…..

We scrapped it, not all of it, well, most of it… We had a week to come up with something, so the idea was to take something classic and put a modern twist to it, upcycle if you will. Both of us being old arcade fans thought it might be a good idea to take something like Gauntlet and re imagine how it could be done now. Taking what we had already done from the networking and the ideas that the procedural generation gave us, we started putting it all into Gauntlet Re-forged.

And that’s what Gauntlet Re-forged is intended to be, an arcade like maze runner where you explore procedurally generated dungeons looking for loot and treasure, dodging traps and dispatching as many monsters as you can. Up to four players networked, or as a single player game.

In single player mode you can either go alone (not recommended) or take along up to three of the other characters with you and switch between them as you go. While not under your control, they will do their best to keep themselves safe and follow the character you are controlling.

There are leader boards for the most coins, the highest exploration percentage and the most kills, these tables are for both party and individual players.

There is a bit of skulduggery that comes into play too, but I’ll save that for future posts.

Currently at the time of writing, we have been working on the game for about a month, alas, even though we are old, we still need to work, so at the moment, we are doing this around our day jobs as well as other life commitments. We are hoping to have the game released in the New Year (2025), no idea when yet, again, something for future posts.

As ever, your comments and ideas are more than welcome, so please post and let us know what you think.

All the best,

GnatByte (Charles)