Project Hell — Dev Blog #1: So, What Am I Making?

So, I’m making a game.

It’s called Project Hell, and it’s a 2D action platformer about a guy trying to climb his way out of Hell.

The basic idea is that there's this guy named Isaiah, he was a christian all his life right, went to church every wednesdya and sunday, rode his bike to work when they raised the gas prices, etc, so this guy dies, and of course you'd expect a guy so religious to be sent to heaven right? but he actually wakes up in hell! He doesn’t have a mouth or arms, and he’s accompanied by Coo, a strange little wisp that leads Isaiah to the Trials of the Fools, an ancient trial said to grant the damned access to Heaven. To earn his place among the saved, Isaiah must defeat the Seven Deadly Sins and survive whatever Hell has prepared for him.

And yes, the fact that my Isaiah wakes up in Hell with no arms is mostly an excuse to make Coo do all the attacking for him, as well as for me so i don't have to animate arm motions n stuff

What kind of game is it?

The biggest thing I want Project Hell to be is fun to move around in.

The gameplay takes a lot of inspiration from the typical indie game inspirations, mostly things that are gameplay first, story second, like Mega Man, Pizza Tower, Ori and the Blind Forest, but I also want it to have interesting and colorful characters similar to Undertale/Deltarune.

The structure

The game takes some inspiration from the Mega Man formula.

There are several stages based around the Seven Deadly Sins, with the player being able to tackle most of them in whatever order they want.

Each Sin has their own stage, enemies, gimmicks(?), and boss.

After dealing with the Sins, the game leads into a series of more difficult platforming gauntlets before the final confrontation with Pride.

The Sins themselves aren't just generic demons, either. Each one is designed around a particular psychological concept that fits their Sin.

Pride is the main villain and leader of the others, while the rest of the Sins have their own personalities and themes.

What am I actually doing right now?

I'm making the game in Godot, despite having almost no coding experience, let alone game dev experience when I started. unless you count rivals of aether characters as dev experience, which, hey, some people do.

Which has resulted in a lot of:

“Why the fuck is the camera doing that? this code shit is impossible”

But it's actually coming together. I've gotten the basic player movement working.

Right now, a lot of the game is still very much in the prototype phase. There are plenty of placeholder assets and systems that exist mainly so I can test whether something is actually fun before I spend hours making it look pretty.

There's not much point in making a beautiful animation for a mechanic that turns out to suck.

What's next?

Right now, I'm mostly focused on getting the core gameplay into a solid state.

Before I worry too much about making entire finished levels, I want to make sure that simply controlling Isaiah feels good.

Once the movement, camera, combat, enemies, and basic level design are working together, I can start building actual stages around them.

Eventually, I'll also start replacing the ugly prototype assets with the actual art and animations.

But for now?

It's a bunch of pixels, rectangles, placeholder enemies, and Godot scripts.

And somehow, that's a game.

This is only the beginning of Isaiah & Coo.