This is the first devlog for this game, and also my first devlog ever!!

I've been a professional game dev for about 4 years but I have never made a multiplayer game. I never even usually *play* multiplayer games.

However I went through a spate of playing two of them recently..

1. 'Go' the ancient Chinese boardgame, which I played on kgs

2. 'Supreme commander' the epic scale RTS, with an emphasis on strategy,  by gas powered games. I played this on the awesome community made lobby FAF, Forged Alliance Forever

During this period I came up with the idea for this game. So I think in my twisted brain the core concepts of LazerGrrl are derived from from those two games.

I thought it I would have a go building it for fun + for the experience of making a multiplayer game.
There was alocal game-dev event coming up so I threw together the prototype in the video with Unity in 2-3 days. Its just a local multiplayer game with controller or keyboard input.

It got a good reaction from some people. Some people were able to have fun competitive games and play over and over. I was not expecting that considering it was such an early build, just the very 1st working prototype from my brain, with no playtesting or thought put into the game design. I reckon if I'm careful with this and make the right decisions it could end up being a pretty good game.

After talking to other devs and seeing people play it (and playing it myself for the 1st time) I started to formulate some initial design principles that will guide the design of the game. They're based on the games I was playing 'go' and 'supcom'.

1. Simple rules and element leads to complex behaviour.  (like in go) For example, only have a few kinds of blocks the player can build, but let them place them in many different  configurations, leading to many emergent strategies and counter-strategies

2. The game is like an RTS boiled down to the absolute core. By which I mean you fight over resources to spend on infrastructure which you use to fight over more resources.

An artist with some pretty impressive stuff agreed to work on it with me. and has already thrown down a few very early concept sketches, which I've added.

So next steps are..

1. Get multiplayer working over the internet

2. Get people playing it.

3. Use metrics and feedback from players to inform decision making in the game design