Hi, me and Nicklas begun the development of Skullkeys in april 2021 with the vision to make an awesome metroidvania / dungeon crawler game. We wanted to build the kind of game we grew up with. You know like; Castlevania, Metroid, Faxanadu, Blaster Master etc.
Skullkeys is in very early development, but we aim to release early access releases VERY SOON as we want to get input from the community and get the word going.
We are talking about setting up a build server and let users download the latest test builds from our website to try out. All while we develop the game for a full official release…in the future. 🥳
The tools we are using to reach our game development goal is mostly free / open source solutions:
GODOT – game engine. It’s such a wonderful game engine. In my opinion it’s up there with the mighty Unity / UE in many ways. Godot is lightweight, accessible and supports both 2D and 3D in intuitive ways. For us it’s a great collaborative tool.
Blender – for overall 3d graphics and some image processing. I made the Skullkeys logo, and sculpt the skulls in Blender app. Blender is free / open source and is so smooth for general modelling, shading. The accessible nodebased system can quickly create powerful graphical setups.
Affinity Designer – pixel & vector graphics / image processing. Affinity makes the best graphic tools on the market and while it is a payed product, the price (subscription free!!!) is just a bargain – $24.99 on Mac/Win….and only 9.99 on iPad! Highly recommended app!
TexturePacker – for packing sprites into neat spritesheets.
Bitbucket / GIT – for source code version control. Our safety and collaboration environment.
Logic Pro – Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) is used to create the music and sound effects you hear in SkullKeys. We use a mixture of real world (recorded) foley sounds with synthesized sound effects to create the atmosphere of Skullkeys.
Bitwig Studio – another DAW which Mattias use to create the music of Skullkeys.
FL Studio – yet another DAW which is used to create music and sound effects. FL has a very intuitive sound editor (Edison) which is great for overall noise cleanup and audio file processing.
Both me and Nicklas are avid codes and game designers so we are splitting the development work between us to make the most of our skills where needed.
Today I (Mattias) animated the logo with some dramatic lighting and subtle movement to make the skulls feel more hostile and eerie. Yes, it’s a simple Blender scene with a 1 logo, 3 skulls, 2 light-sources (yellow key-light, and a blue light from the bottom). Dramatic!
Nicklas have been implementing destructible tiles so you can blow up some of the blocks in the world and it looks smashing! He is also working on some of the traps in the game. We love to play with physics so there will be plenty of bones breaking in Skullkeys. And many objects will interact in intuitive ways to make the world come alive!
We are aiming for accessible game objects, enemies and traps which can easily be placed while designing levels.
Here are some very early screenshots.
Make sure to bookmark skullkeys.com so you get the latest news. Very soon we will add some videos of the actual gameplay in action.
…to be continued…