Version 0.3 Released!

Howdy Y’all, it's been a while. A lot has happened since the last dev log we posted and now and the game is almost not recognizable as that scrappy little game from the 2024 Indie City Games Jampus Jam. 

Firstly let's discuss our socials! We have opened up several channels of communication as we develop the adventure the sheriff will embark upon. This will give us a great opportunity for growing our network and communicating with our players. We have set up a few channels for this purpose:

Our Bluesky:

https://bsky.app/profile/docsshufflinshoot.bsky.social

Run by Adam, this will serve as a way to tease updates, interact with the community and point towards

Our Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/docsshufflinshootout

Run by Justin,  this currently serves as a behind the scenes for the game and will be used to share teasers and the like.

Our Discord:

https://discord.gg/DuzAk5tJCp

This will be used to directly interact with the community, share memes, clips and teasers for new content.

This will be the first bit of social media that will be used 

Youtube 

https://www.youtube.com/@DocsShufflinShootout

This is used to post trailers, teasers and dev logs.

But that’s not all ya hear? We have a whole new build and yet another fresh face!

Meet our new audio help and sound designer: Max Volpert, from Spit it out audio. She has worked closely with Justin and has been more than gracious to join us on our development journey. 

Now for the build itself: 

Doc’s Challenge & Leaderboard

The first thing y’all might notice is the new leaderboard. This is a local leaderboard meant for showcasing at events like C.I.G.S in Chicago and M+DEV in Wisconsin. Once you press Play, you may notice a new game mode: Doc’s Challenge replaces the original version of the jam game with an endless mode with waves of dozens of nasty bandits, evil red rats, and valuable cards. The player no longer heals at the end of each wave creating actual stakes from wave to wave while you open up pack after pack to get our new Item cards. 

Additionally Adam has painstakingly finished up controller support making Doc’s supported (Unofficially) on the Steam Deck (They’re making decks out of steam now?!) While the keyboard and mouse is the recommended way to play, this allows for folks who want to use a controller to play Doc’s.

New Visuals! 

Now that Lizzie has the reins for the game’s art style, the future of how Doc’s looks in her hands. Lizzie is in the process of creating new environment, character, and enemy assets, including our new cowboy and environment. Yeehaw! We can’t wait for you to see even more of her new designs!

New Room???

As sad as it is, our original level has hung up its spurs to make way for new level layouts, and in a new perspective! Though the new room layout is smaller than our original test scene, this marks a turning point for how the game will play as you traverse the vast desert. We are looking into expanding out this smaller room into multiple rooms for the player to fight, explore, and solve puzzles to get to the heart of Doc’s operation. Our next update will be expanding out this room into a world during endless to showcase what gameplay looks like and opens the door for a  story mode to come into existence. 

Reworked bullets

One of the biggest items to be addressed was how bullets functioned (Or didn’t). Each bullet got a makeover to make them more fun to use and much more powerful. Justin worked on VFX for all bullets and their status effects.While I don’t want to spoil the full set of changes, I will go over the most notable ones, being Rat, Lasso, and Arcing bullets. 

Rat functions similarly to how it did before but now enemies that have been transformed into rats will follow the player in a nice little line. Rats will also orbit the player when stationary and can soak up a few bullets of damage. 

Lasso now will visually pull enemies towards the player and bind them, leaving them open for a few well placed bullets. You can now also use Lasso to pull items like booster packs toward you if it’s too dangerous to rush in to grab them! 

Arcing was remade from the ground up to improve its chaining behavior and has a new visual to accompany the electrifying feats of arcing. 

Reworked spawning

Spawning has been completely reworked to make balancing and scaling to the first few waves easier and now allows for multiple enemies to spawn at once. This allows for designer-created enemy configurations.

As we continue marching forth with our demo version for M+DEV we will update when we are ready for CIGS/ GDEX. As Adam will be keeping an eye at the booth for CIGS, Justin will be representing Spit It Out! Audio at GDEX with the same build of the game. We are much further along, but we still have a few things to work on before we have a build ready for Steam. For those who have kept watch, we thank y’all for sticking by as we continue along with development full steam ahead. We are excited to see folks enjoy our game at our first showcases and we are excited to see folks in the near future!

Anyway, this is Shuffled Cowpoke Productions signing off, and we hope all you gamers, outlaws, and cowboys take care on the road—y’all come back now, y’hear?