Dev Blog #01 - Welcome to Grand Gate

Hello and welcome to very first Dev Blog of Grand Gate!

I'm Lucas (AKA Azeros) and I'm the founder of Golden Glove, lead design and artist on Grand Gate. You'll be hearing from me and our co-founder Bruno (AKA Pexe) who is our lead programmer about every 2 weeks. Beyond these specified roles we both share and delve into many other areas of game development (That's the reality of indie devs).

We'll post bigger sized updates every month and we'll squeeze in some byte sized development news between the larger posts about what we're working on, and how they're being built.

Without further a do: What is Grand Gate?

Grand Gate was born out of our desire to learn how to make games, so we set out to find a genre that we could give our own twist and that would not be overly complex for beginners, so we asked our friends and one of them suggested to look into the Tower Defense genre, which turned out to be a great match due to our old passions of Warcraft 3 TD mods and other, similar experiences.

Grand Gate is a mix between Tower Defense and RPG

To give this meaning, I'll first show you some raw PRE-ALPHA gameplay snippets:

(Remember, we're a long way off from launch!)

First off, the basics: As the commander, your goal is to defeat all enemies before they reach their goal. You are able to summon in the designated tiles through the usage of shards. Towers summoned in front of enemies will block them, with a varying limit from tower to tower (You can expect tank towers to be able to block more enemies!)

Shards are regenerated at a passive rate and generated on every enemy death, our intent is that the amount received from kills are larger than the passive regen as this prevents the player from stalling the game. Towers have a varying cost of shard according to their base power.

You select which towers you want to bring into a quest by forming up a squadron. Each squadron is composed of 3 legends and 4 pawns. (You'll be able to save and switch between many squadrons with a loadout system). Towers are split between legends and pawns:

Legends are central pieces of our story and have an enormous amount of power. While in a match there can only be 1 instance of each legend alive, meaning you cannot resummon Scarlet if she's already in the battlefield. Additionally, all legends' skills are upgradeable through leveling and other means (More on that in a future dev blog!).

Skills of the legend Scarlet, the Deadeye

Pawns have specialized kits and are meant to complement your chosen Legends in the battlefield, they can also be upgraded while in a match through the usage of shards and have no summoning restrictions. Some of them can heal, some are specialized in dealing pyro damage and so forth.

Skills of a Grand Watcher

Towers that have an available burst skill can activate it by utilizing all available energy. Energy generation is unique to each other, but in general energy is generated by hitting an enemy, healing an ally or through their energy regeneration attribute. Legends also have access to a link skill which is used to enhance a selected pawn, these do not consume all available energy, though their cost will vary. Our intent is that the player has to choose whether to setup their towers with link skills or save energy for a precisely timed burst skill. We see our levels as a puzzle which the player can solve in many ways, we hope you'll have fun finding the solutions!

All of our towers have unique mechanics, our design intent is that the player will make multiple squadrons and switch between them according to the quest, or just play around and make some fun builds and hope that it'll get you through the combat encounters. We aim to deliver a game with depth that will require the player to strategize, while remaining simple to understand (Easy to play, hard to master!) and retaining plenty of room for creativity.

With all that said, in the next Dev Blog we'll explore some of inner workings of our combat, including tower and enemy behaviors.

Don't forget, we'll sometimes drop by in our steam forums.

We hope that you'll accompany us in our journey to launch in 2023.

Thank you!

Azeros