Concept

The concept of 《Drifting》 was born in 2018 March.

The idea is to create a combat system that allows players to fully utilize three-dimensional space - combat and traversing happens not only on floors but walls and ceilings as well. The project naturally inherited many parkour elements in the early prototype phase: grappling hook, wall-running, wall-sliding, dashing...etc, to facilitate the protagonist's movement in 3D space. Since traversing is a crucial part of the game, I've put a lot of effort to ensure the game is still fun to play even without players engaging in combat.

Gameplay Cycle

Around mid-2018, the first version of the game's core gameplay cycle has completed. Each encounter in the game requires players to throw a sphere onto a statue, shoot the sphere and open up the entrance to the next level, and prepare for the next encounter rinse and repeat. The versatility of the cycle came from how the level spawns the sphere, the location of the statue, the obstacles between the sphere and the statue, thus providing players multiple gameplay experiences with the same rhythm but different pitch and volume.

SpeedRun

In late 2019, I started to explore the game's potential for speedrunning. A basic countdown timer and leaderboard system were built to track and rank the performance of players' gameplay results each time they run through a particular level. Gameplaywise, speedrun provide an extra dimension for an otherwise fixed difficulty level, by comparing the performance of each speedrun session, the game provides an incentive for players to re-try the same level for a higher rank.

Video: Speed-run demo

Future Prospect

As of early 2020, the game has reached its first milestone - game mechanics and all the essential systems are completed (albeit not finalized). In the later phase of the development cycle, I will be adding more types of enemy and adding more levels in to the game, providing a wider variety of gameplay experiences for players.

P.S. This is My first post on Itch.io, I'm looking forward to meet and make new friends here, I wish you all have a productive day! :D