The current design thoughts (contains spoilers!)

Well, I want to try to be fairly open about the development of this game, but admittedly I've been planning some stuff before building the engine, since I wanted to have something simple to present to people before uploading it.

Let's see if I can catch everybody up.

Before you proceed beyond this point: There will be spoilers ahead!

I will have two sections, the "light spoilers" section which focuses more towards early game stuff, and the "heavy spoilers" section, which will cover later-game stuff, though I won't be covering any of the planned finale here so as to not spoil too much for people who'd rather have a few surprises ahead.

If you care about this, please leave the page now and visit again another time.

LIGHT SPOILERS!

The plan I've had from early on for this has been that the player character would crash land on a distant, alien world, and is simply trying to get back off the planet over the course of the game. At an earlier point in development I considered having a long section where the player would have to fight stuff off without even having an armor and solve puzzles and whatnot like that to progress, with its own ability set, but I kind of felt like that'd be a little too much and a little too ambitious for the scope of what I want to accomplish here.

Tip to fellow designers: Try to keep scope under control as best as you can, especially if you're on a tight schedule! I may have failed to do that on a previous project, and I might regret how much longer it took to make it because of that.

I did, however, decide to keep the idea that you'd start the game without the armor, I just cut back how long I want that segment to take. Instead of basically being the opening segment of the game, I instead decided it would make more sense if it was a short 5-10 or so minute segment where you don't have to do too much before you find the ancient alien artifact that would form your armor.

Speaking of which, I actually went through several armor concepts before settling on the skeleton armor.
Note that these concepts aren't really listed in any particular order.

At first I wasn't sure whether I wanted something that looked more alien or something that looked more humanoid, but was sure I wanted to come up with something a bit more unique. At the end of the process, I decided on a sort of skeletal-looking armor.

When I had the design down, I decided from there that, instead of the armor itself being the relic the player would use to survive, instead the relic has the ability to take any endoskeleton and somehow reconstruct it as a heavily-reinforced exoskeleton. So basically, it makes your skeleton go from inside your body to outside your body. Not the most pleasant process, but it sure does make it easier to survive somewhere like this.

Anyways, I kind of needed an ability set after that.

So I talked to my sister, who likes Metroidvanias, about possible ability concepts and basically had a brainstorming session.

The first ability, since you'd get it fairly early, I'll list under the light spoilers section still. Everything else, including why I was targeting the number of abilities I went for, I'll save for the next section.

1st ability: Triple shot
Fires three shots forwards or in a spread, listed as two menu items at the top to let you switch configurations. Can open certain doors.

Basically, your first ability will let you switch to a weapon that either fires three lasers stacked on top of each other but aimed in the same direction, or three lasers aimed at a bit of an angle from each other. Or you can just settle with the standard laser attack. The choice is yours!

Anyways, I think that's all I have for the light spoilers section. Now it's on to...

HEAVY SPOILERS!

I wanted the game's structure to be linear enough to where the player can make it through easily without looking up a guide, yet simultaneously allow the player to do anything in any order if they know what they're doing and desire to do so. In the end, I decided that the structure would be loosely that you need to get 4 specific "core abilities" in a fixed order if you don't know about 4 hidden techniques that can be used as a substitute for the 4 "core abilities". If you do know about them, you can basically go anywhere at any time and ignore the 4 "core abilities" until they're required for story-related progression at the very tail end of the game (if they are even going to be necessary for that, mind you).

However, since the game's map structure is non-euclidean, I also had to figure out a way to guide the player without a map. For that, I decided to take some cues from an early FPS I'm rather fond of and include a guidance drone of sorts that can be manually activated at any time to tell you which room exit will lead you in the direction of the "core ability" for the area you're currently in. Additionally though, the player will have the option to warp directly to the central starting area at any time, which also should be handy in the event players use the hidden techniques to try to ignore the core abilities and accidentally get themselves stuck in the process.

The hope is that there would be other, less important abilities to find along the way and whatnot to encourage exploration, though I'm actually still not 100% sure what those abilities should be yet.

Anyways, I'm sure you're curious by now what those other three abilities and the hidden techniques I've come up with are, so onward! 

As a reminder: Everything is subject to change!

2nd ability: Flare gun
Instant kill on regular enemies after 1-3 second delay depending on enemy type. Can melt certain walls. Can hurt Mirogox (bosses).

3rd ability: Drill dash
Turn into a drill and quickly dash forwards for a bit. Can drill through certain walls and can be ended early by jumping.
Double tap in a direction or select it from your menu and press attack. 

4th ability: Hover board
Lets you fly, but shares fuel with flare gun. Can be used to get to higher ground.

And the hidden techniques, though I won't be listing how to execute them.

Hidden tech 1: Charge shot
Can break doors that triple shot can open, does more damage to regular enemies.

Hidden tech 2: Chainsaw Whirl
Function: Works like the pseudo screw attack and can break meltable walls. Does damage to Mirogox.

Hidden tech 3: Mach Breaker
Function: When you land, you roll forwards really fast until you start to fall, a bit like a speed-booster/mock ball hybrid. Breaks drillable blocks.

Hidden tech 4: Defiance Leaper
Function: Press jump repeatedly to jump an indefinite number of times.

The main goal of the game is currently planned to be to get to a fifth area after killing enough of the Mirogox to get an audience with "King Skull", a mysterious character who,  based on some information from your suit, may in some way be able to get you off this world. What is planned to happen from there, I won't say.

Well, I bet there's some plans and how I came up with them and whatnot here and there I've missed for this, but hopefully this has caught everybody up on the most important of the current plans for this and some insight on how I came up with that stuff to begin with.

I'm hoping to do more write-ups like this for the game in the future, though later ones will probably not be quite as long as this one was admittedly. If anybody has any feedback, suggestions, etc., please do let me know!