Guns N' Boxes

Devlog of a top-down single screen multiplayer game where you control crazy characters and battle with random weapons.

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Guns N’ Boxes DevLog: Part 1

Welcome to the first part of a series about the design process that we undertook to develop the game Guns N’ Boxes, which is currently in Early Access on Steam. We hope you find this informative and can use it to your benefit.

Around June 2015, our studio cut off a previous project to begin work on a new prototype we had been testing. Instead of a single-player platformer, it would be a multiplayer shooter, with quick action and loads of guns, the sillier the better. This is how we came up with Guns N’ Boxes.

We have a number of design philosophies at Light Arrow Games. One of them is that innovation is not only about creating new content, but about remixing older content and making it fresh and new. What was a good idea back then would be awesome nowadays with the right choices. This is backed by how many recent games often take an older design concept and update it with new ideas.

We also believe that any game you make must be made as if you were to consume it. It must appeal to you as a consumer, not just as a creator. It has to be something you’d actually play, not just want to have made.

It turns out that everyone in our studio enjoys multiplayer games. In particular, the Lead Designer for this project has a deep love for Bomberman and other single-screen arena games. So we decided to make a game that evoked the same feelings in its players. It would have to feel like something more modern, though. Something we also liked were twin-stick shooters. Nuclear Throne was all the rage and the promising Enter The Gungeon was upcoming and ended up being a hit. We also liked very much how may roguelike games handled random stages and weapon drops. It gave them a sense of unpredictability and greatly increased what is known as “replay value”.

So we decided to mix all these up. We’d make a multiplayer arena-style twin-stick shooter where you could play a game that felt Bomberman-ish, at least at first impression, but with the action of a modern shooter. This action should feel fast, frantic and make an impact on the players. Matches should be contests of skill that end quickly and leave the players wanting to right wrongs or cement their glory in the upcoming match.

For random weapon drops, we proposed that crates should be scattered randomly on the battlefield, and breaking these would have a chance to yield a weapon chest that, if touched by your character, would randomly change your gun into another weapon. This way, no two matches would ever feel the same.

This would give a sort of balance to the game. The game’s main mechanic would be this random weapon switching, and being a skilled player would mean knowing how to use your weapons efficiently and adapting to the moment, so a bit of luck and a lot of skill would be involved.

When we finished making a prototype that suited this criteria, we tested it. It’s important to check if the prototype itself is fun, and if it’s not, rethink the idea. This eliminates problems from the get-go. And as it turned out, the game was quite fun indeed. We found ourselves wanting to play it without needing to test it, and this cemented our choice to suspend the ongoing project, which suffered from too high ambitions, to work on this promising prototype.

Much remains to talk about: game balance, weapon design, aesthetic choices, map-creation tools, fine-tuning shaders, asset creation pipeline and of course, many problems that came up during development., We’ll talk about how we solved those issues in future posts in this series. Keep tuned!