- The Escape From Limbo Update - GGG Dev Log #11 - 29 August 2026
In all seriousness, this update should have come out a year ago and it IS a bit embarrassing development getting sidetracked for this long, but that's just life. No need to get into the weeds of everything right now, but I did move so that was at least one of the major distractions in the last year.For the update itself, we have a nice overview video if you'd like:Otherwise, here's the gist of it!For starters, I decided to finish the rest of the graphics for the obstacles and guns, they look a lot better now and I'm much happier with how the game looks.And of course this means they now all glow very nicely in the dark as well!And along with the models and textures are also the rest of the explosion variants for all of these as well. All of these visual changes/completions apply to the boss fight too.This isn't the only visual upgrade, originally the core change of this update was going…
- Oooh! Shiny! - GGG Dev Log #10 - 20 April 2024
I can't deny, it hasn't been as productive of a first month since launch as I'd like. Early Spring + some life stuff keeping me busy for a bit and whoops the time flies by in a way that makes me baffled a month has already passed. But besides life, the two major things that hit recently was a mix of burnout after rushing to hit my own deadline, and decision paralysis. I really had to tie myself to the ground and stop chasing each shiny different feature I wanted to work on all at once now that I'm free from deadline-necessary features. Oooh gauntlets! Oooh new players! Oooh polish! Bug fixes! Updating UI! More arenas! Finishing the proper roadmap! Better tutorials! Ooh shiny oooh shiiiny! Aaaaaand you leave yourself doing none of it because you want to do all of it. Luckily I think I've gotten ahold of myself and progress is starting to inch along faster again. Of course, I don't want t…
- So, what's next? - GGG Dev Log #9 - 17 March 2024
We've finally ripped the bandaid off by committing to the recent release date, a somewhat arbitrary goal to hit but one that felt important of else I'd find excuses to just keep avoiding releasing the game at all. Get the baseline features in place and feeling decent, then release to Early Access when the majority of the rest of development would be adding content, a simple plan and now we just have to pull off the "add content" part. Of course, along the way we've also hit a lot of "I'd like to add this" or "I'd like to polish that" or "This feature isn't cool enough", so there's definitely a bit of polish left to do as well. The first major content update will probably actually take a bit of time, as recently I realized I wasn't satisfied with the Survival Mode menu, it seemed a bit bland and uninspired and it dawned on me that this "Mission Mode" idea we had occasionally mentioned ha…
- GGG Change Log v0.7.0 - Early Access Launch Update! - 15 March 2024
Game is out now on Steam Early Access! Buy it within a week of March 15th to get it an extra 10% off! While we kept the demo decently up to date with QoL features as we worked towards release, now we move forward with our first release version! v0.7 brings some rebalance to existing gauntlets and 2 new ones. Two more play modes as well for those who are truly sadistic, One Hit and One Life mode if the game wasn't spicy enough for you. Also another important change is the addition of a level unlocking system, giving a taste for how progress will feel as we add content to the game. v0.7.0 - Removed Demo menus, replaced with regular menus. - Rebalanced Startup Program to be better as a first level. - Rebalanced Gun Gauntlet. - Added new Gauntlet, No Gun Zone. - Added new Gauntlet, Mega Mix. - Added new gameplay music track. - Added new boss music track. - Added One Hit Mode. - Added One Li…
- Demo Change Log v0.6.99999999 - 4 March 2024
While working on the upcoming release, we've been adding some quality of life improvements that seem worth it to upload to the demo as well. This includes something we didn't have ready in time previously, the controller config menu: I still don't consider controller the ideal way to play a game like this, but we'll continue to try to add features to make it at least reasonable over time. Also for those that find the game a bit touchy, we also added a few sensitivity sliders for thumbstick controls: One last notable change we're trying in this version is we've made it so bullets now render in front of other objects, due to the top-down nature of the game we can get away with this without any notable problems from the looks of it, so it should help a lot with clarity: Full changelog for v0.6.99999999: - Subtly tightened controls. - Added movement sensitivity sliders. - Subtle screen effe…
- Great Gun Gauntlet Q&A + Demo Gameplay - 6 February 2024
We're back again this Saturday, between 5PM and 9PM EST, with another session of Q&A while playing the demo. Hopefully this stream goes a little smoother than the last one.
- Steam Next Fest Q&A + Demo Gameplay Stream - 4 February 2024
We're doing a Q&A stream between 5PM and 9PM EST this Monday (and likely another on Saturday), come by to watch some gameplay or talk to the developers.
- Demo Change Log v0.6.9999999 - 2 February 2024
Squashing a few bugs and improving a handful of things to get the demo just a little bit more polished before Next Fest. Wishlist and Feedback buttons now take you to the Steam app instead of web pages (who even logs into steam on their browser?), and now the Settings menu saves changes. v0.6.9999999 - Added basic Steam Overlay integration. - Misc tiny optimizations. - Added ChangeLog file. - Slight UI improvements. - Settings now save and load properly. - Added system for better upgrading Config files during development. - Fixed bug with Spinning Laser Audio AGAIN. - Fixed bug causing boss to shake screen extra. - Fixed bug causing objects to appear during main menu. (Yes I'm doubling down on these version numbers for the demo, you can't stop me.)
- What Even Is "Party Mode"? - GGG Dev Log #8 - 30 January 2024
This was a Dev Log from our blog we meant to post here weeks ago, oops! Just an odd little set of thoughts about an idea we had mentioned earlier in development, specifically the question of what even is this thing we have been calling "Party Mode"? Honestly, its probably not what that name makes people think and I'm trying to think of a better term. Party Mode tends to imply multiplayer/group activity, and if there's any of that included in the mode it'd still only be a small part of it. Sandbox Mode? Extras? Toybox? Basically it's just the place where we can put the "everything else" of the content. This is very much the "no promises" section on top of how much of the content already isn't guaranteed. A first person mode? Put it in there. Customizable challenge modes? Put them in there. Some kind of multiplayer support? Put it in there. Twitch/Streaming integration? Seems like a good…
- Great Gun Gauntlet, coming to Steam Next Fest! - 22 January 2024
We seem to be all set with our demo ready just in time for the upcoming Steam Next Fest! Give it a try February 5th to get a taste for the game before launch! We will likely keep the demo up after the event as well, for those unsure about jumping in on an Early Access title trying a demo is a great way to hook you in figure out if the experience is something you want to play more of immediately or wait until it's finished. The demo will have the first two gauntlets in the first arena, a fraction of the content we want to add to the full game but a good preview of how the main mechanics feel playing as Gear Guy. Besides the demo coming out, we will also be announcing the official release date for Early Access soon. We've already mentioned March as the goal, and as we close in on that it becomes more and more realistic! Stay tuned, these will be an exciting two months for us! Don't forget…
- Visual Clarity VS Pretty Graphics - GGG Dev Log #7 - 22 November 2023
Visual clarity is incredibly important when designing any high intensity game like this, you want the player to be able to quickly read the room and understand what they are up against and how to deal with it. If you are building your visual design entirely focused on visual clarity, you are going to have a good time making your game readable... but if you are like me, then you are also stubborn... you want your game to also have that nice high fidelity look to it and in the process have made striking the balance between your game looking nice and playing well a lot harder. If you are like me, you have also made the mistake of making a game built around an incredibly busy visual style involving conveyors and hundreds of objects on screen. Oh boy. Today I'll be going over some ways I've tried to strike a balance between the graphics and the clarity. This is not the type of game where I w…
- Taking Aim At A Release Window - GGG Dev Log #6 - 16 November 2023
Looks like we did that thing again where we don't post much progress for some months, oops. Ah well, I'll start queuing up some stuff now that we're trying to target an actual release date soon. Cutting to the chase, we're looking at March of 2024 for the first version of Early Access, that should time well with being able to get a demo out for Steam Next Fest along with having all the backbone stuff finished that we've been stuck on for a while. Exact date to be announced. Don't forget to wishlist the game! The main holdup right now is wanting to make sure the reworked UI does everything it should, and that the save files/config files work well. UI stuff doesn't come natural to us it seems, and even the state of the first version will likely be very unpolished, but so long as we can get that to a minimum level of quality we can feel at least somewhat safe to focus down the release wind…
- The Fancy New Particles - Dev Log #5 - 19 January 2023
Strap in folks, this one's a doozy. Today I'd like to talk about a feature I was stubborn about adding despite it perhaps maybe not being the most efficient use of our time; the cool new visual effects we worked on that allows broken obstacle pieces to be properly carried away by the conveyors rather than just sit there in an immersion-breaking way. I'm actually also going to be putting this in the Dev Sandbox category of the blog, because I feel like getting quite technical. I also don't recommend reading this post if seeing back-end game development clips might take you out of the immersion/experience? Might also just be boring. Don't take this as best-practice advice. It's just my experiences solving some weird problems. To properly get started, this is the stuff I'm talking about: The way objects break into many little pieces that then get carried down the conveyor. For context, in…
- Graphical Improvements - Dev Log #4 - 5 January 2023
Recently we've been posting a series of comparison clips between many of the older designs from early development and how they look now. Unfortunately we've found neither our blog nor here has a good format for compiling them in one place, so instead we made a dedicated page on our website for them. You can go here to see the full page of graphical comparison clips. Here's a few highlights anyway though, despite this not being the best format to show them in. First we have the original Turret and Player models getting their graphical upgrades. And also a bright/dark comparison to really show off how nice the new emission textures are being put to use. Yes there is a setting in-game to turn off the lights and play in the dark. And of course the main arena's graphical upgrade. I'm really proud of how this came out, it might not seem like that much compared to some of the other graphics, b…
- Score Combos - Dev Log #3 - 15 December 2022
Another recent improvement to the gameloop has been the addition of a combo system to the way the player scores points. Originally each object simply rewarded a set number of points when destroyed, but now so long as you keep scoring points every second you will receive an increasing amount as your combo increases! A bonus new feature to mention that goes along with this, different obstacles have different amounts of health now, and may take multiple hits to destroy. This doesn't however mean higher health obstacles will ruin your combo, doing damage at all rewards you a small amount of points and keeps your combo fresh! This system isn't just for the benefit of your high scores and adding meta to the community score competition, but also ties into how progress works in this game. Progression towards beating a gauntlet/increasing its difficulty is advanced entirely by score, so if you'd…
- Fancier Obstacle Spawning - Dev Log #2 - 1 December 2022
Welcome back, for our second dev log we'll be talking about improvements made to the obstacle spawning system, like most features it has improved a lot since the original demo. The spawning system is another core system and like the conveyors talked about in our previous dev log the quality of this system decides just how interestingly we can design the game. In the original demo all this system could do was decide which obstacles were created and how many were being created per second, the obstacles were always randomly placed with only a few rules in the logic such as Lasers or Spinners only being able to be placed on center lanes. In the current version we have full control over which lanes on each conveyor each object is allowed to be placed on, this is a massive step up as it allows us to do very interesting positioning and themed patterns in the gauntlets. A lot of dev time will g…
- Fancier Conveyors - Dev Log #1 - 24 November 2022
Hey there, welcome to the first dev log for Great Gun Gauntlet! I'm hoping these are nice and informative and help keep people up to date with everything we're working on as development continues. For these first few we will be talking about changes from our old Alpha Demo. Starting with a relatively simple yet fundamental feature of the game, let's talk about Conveyors! First, a quick overview of their role in the game: In Great Gun Gauntlet obstacles are brought into the arena via the conveyors, this makes the conveyors fundamental to the appearance of obstacles and their positioning in the arena; some obstacles are only threatening to the player because of what the conveyors are doing as they move them around. In the Alpha Demo conveyors were very stiff, three conveyors with directions Right, Left, Right or vise versa if the speeds were reversed. >>
