PROJECT YUGOPUNK

This is a project that I currently work on in my spare time. It’s a science fiction video game, made with Blender, Godot engine and Visual Studio code for the most part.
I have no formal education in the subject of programming or most other things related to game development but I enjoy learning as much as I can about these subjects.

YUGOPUNK :

Brotherhood and Unity

Setting:

Hundreds of years after the cold war started, in a far away region of the galaxy, lies an ancient, mysterious, and largely unexplored planet. The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia claims the planet as their own but lack the means to fully harness its secrets, for the planet is treacherous and inhospitable; Dust, anomalies and trapped structures make traversing the abandoned world dangerous and unpredictable, but in the sands, hidden by time, there are remnants long forgotten.

Survive in this world through sheer determination, and grow stronger by exploring dark tech-vaults, old bunkers and quarries of rare materials -- scavenge everything that isn’t bolted down! Make friends and enemies through your own actions, but make sure you don’t antagonize the wrong factions…

Features:

Unique, dynamic characters roaming the land, scavenging, hunting, exploring
Many different locations to explore; Forgotten vaults in the sands, forests full of dangerous creatures and more.
Strange items and artifacts to find in the sands.
Light RPG mechanics
Hand-pixelled environments, items, effects etc.
A unique sci-fi Yugoslav inspired setting.
Stale humor. As it should be.

Why this game?

There is something about a systems-driven game that attracts me more than story driven games, and it is becoming worse the older I get. Being able to see "behind the curtain" of a game that relies upon its story ruins a game more for me now than it used to. There’s very little about the experience that feels as authentic as you want then. There’s also a growing sense of frustration whenever I want to immerse myself in a game world, but then instead having to listen to 20 hours of underpaid voice-actors narrating it to me — instead of me discovering it for myself.

If I steal all the possessions of an NPC in a role-playing game it doesn’t change much, but if you steal everything from a person in a systems-driven game then that matters to that NPC; They then have no weapons or money to survive with, for example, which changes the experience dramatically.
There might be some inherent satisfaction in knowing this, even if you never rob the NPC blind at all. Playing within these constraints and rules makes immersion much easier, and figuring out how to navigate through them makes the experience that much richer.

This is why I want this game to be made. There are elements in games like Mount & Blade, or S.T.A.L.K.E.R. that I find admirable, but perhaps they’re not tied together the way that I want, so the only thing to do is make it myself and quit pining for something that’s not going to happen without me.

Development

This project is something I’ve been working on since the summer of 2018, on and off depending on my available time.

It started off as something that was a bit of a proof of concept after I discovered the Godot engine, and multiple little projects being started and abandoned. This is the one that stuck, since there were several parts of it I could envision pretty easily.

We’ll see if this turns into something.

Some early concept-art stuff I did for it.