Development Status
Alpha (V3)
| Name | Date | Stage |
|---|---|---|
| Project Top Down Blazin | September 16th - November 7th, 2019 | Concept |
| Project Perspective Shooter | November 7th, 2019 - May 29th, 2020 | Concept |
| Rusty Capper | May 29th, 2020 - February 9th, 2022 | Alpha |
| Killemony Alpha V1 | February 9th, 2022 - March 23rd, 2023 | Alpha |
| V2 | March 23rd, 2023 - July 2nd, 2024 | Alpha |
| V3 | July 2nd, 2024 - Now | Alpha |
| Beta | ||
| Demo | ||
| Final |
Inspirations
Killemony was originally inspired by the Hotline Miami series, Hatred, Gain Ground, and Zombie Rush (Roblox). Survive the Distasters also inspired a few systematic ideas I used for Killemony, although the gameplay isn’t similar. Later on, Bloons Supermonkey 2 and the TD games influenced the gun upgrading system, since I liked the implementation of upgrading towers and wanted to try something similar with weapons.
One might also say Dungeon Shooter (Roblox) inspired this game, since Killemony started development a year after that game. However, I didn’t play Dungeon Shooter until 2024, and if you play the earliest version of Killemony through Killemini, a compilation game of all my early or cancelled game demos, you’ll see that Killemony was heavily inspired by Hotline Miami, Gain Ground, and Zombie Rush in the beginning.
Any games I haven’t listed most likely aren’t direct influences, although they may have influenced some of my influences.
Conception
It all started while I was playing Zombie Rush on Roblox, which I’ve played since 2014. The gameplay was addicting. I loved the maps, the shooting mechanics, the boombox, and the high-octane gameplay. I had a habit of playing the game viewing and shooting enemies from a birds-eye angle of my character. This habit influenced me to create a game like Zombie Rush, but in a top-down view. However, I encountered a few obstacles at the time. Zombie Attack along with a few other Zombie Stories were zombie wave games created months prior, receiving millions of plays, with the former even surpassing Zombie Rush in total play count. Also, my coding abilities were primitive, so I couldn’t really make a game like Zombie Rush even if I tried. So, for a few months, I was stuck with a rough imagination of what would later become Killemony.
On July 22nd, 2019, I had just learned FM Synthesis and started creating some early tunes for a new project called True Villain, which was originally called Toon Villain at the time. Nearly 2 months later, I took a brief break from that game and created concept music for potential projects. One of those songs was titled “Preparation”, for a new game idea called “Project Top Down Blazin”, the earliest name for Killemony.
I played Gain Ground for the Sega Genesis for a few days. But I would always find myself going back to Zombie Rush on Roblox. It was then I had the realization that I wanted to make a Zombie Rush carbon copy.
On November 7th, 2019, I was playing yet another session of Zombie Rush, when I finally decided to make my own version of the game. It was going to be a top-down game, with a yet undecided official name, instead named “Project Perspective Shooter”. Originally, Killemony was going to be a top-down, endless wave, shooter game just like Zombie Rush. But while I was building and coding a rough draft of the game. I came to the realization that Killemony could become something more, and from that point Killemony became its own thing.
Project Top Down Blazin'
September 16th, 2019
This is the earliest version of Killemony, but it was merely a concept at the time. The only thing that existed before the game itself were a couple of concept songs and a folder titled “Project Top Down Blazin”.
Project Perspective Shooter
November 7th, 2019
The game instance is created. A very tiny amount of development was performed as a concept of what this game would look like.
May 29th, 2020
I decided to take a break from True Villain, as I had brainstormed more ideas for Project Perspective Shooter in the last 6 months. From the beginning, I decided the maps for this game were going to be built in a gridded tile layout. I built several map themes: city, house, restaurant, grass, subway, parking garage, and office. On the GUI side of things, I also added a custom health bar (now obsolete), but that was it.
On this day, I gave the game its first official name, “Rusty Capper”, however, nothing in this build resembled the Rusty Capper build of the game (hint’s the reason I didn’t categorize the date 5/29/2020 under Rusty Capper).
Rusty Capper
This phase of development originally went for a war setting. Around the time, I was thinking about joining the military, but that plan never fully came into fruition past the application process. Also, I was strongly into history about both World Wars, Cold War and proxy wars, and recent conflicts of the 21st Century and wanted to develop my game in that style.
September 25th - 26th, 2020
I built the tutorial stage for the game, “Warehouse”. I also added a simple main menu, hub, and course interface. GUIs were given a sleek fading transparency design, which was my aim towards making the most visually integrative interface I could that didn’t visually obstruct the objects within the 3D environment.
And then I added a new but unfunctional hub map, and 50 world maps, although I recanted this decision 2 years later, because 50 locations in one game was too large and ambitious for one person to develop.
Only half of the 16 final maps were realized in this build:
- Flogeo
- Gunpines
- Top Crops (now Boomaville)
- Rud Smokes
- Robin Winters
- Je Vera (now Jessix)
- Dearcy
- Magmarvelous
Clearcast was also a planned full map before being changed into an interlude level in 2022. “Magmarvelous” was reused from a level name in True Villain ← This is also the precursor and first instance of the shared universe concept, the Killemony Universe.
October 5th, 2020
I extended the tutorial map to add more depth when the game was ready to be publicly activated for testing
This would never happen; open testing wouldn’t go into effect for another
twofour years.
I also reduced the amount of stuff on the course interface, since I felt there was too much on screen at the time.
October 29th, 2020
I put aside the tutorial level and started working on the first version of Flogeo, the official first map in the game. This version was very primitive, as it used Roblox rather than meshes and eventually planes created in blender. The map changed appearances various times, because I didn’t know exactly how Flogeo should look in the game.
April 24th, 2021 - October 21st, 2021
I TOOK A LONG BREAK!
But briefly on July 3rd, I made a version of Flogeo’s map that was merged with Gunpines.
December 4th, 2021
I bought a newer, more powerful laptop on this day and immediately replaced Roblox parts with blender meshes as map tile sets. I caught covid 4 weeks later, and from there, the development was basically stagnant in the first quarter of 2022.
2022
Development on the game was dormant the whole year. I was busy doing what many 21-year-olds do when they hit that age. With 2 years already passing and very little progress being made, I was genuinely contemplating about giving up on development for good.
But there was one significant change I made in March that would change the gravity of the whole development for the following years…
Killemony
V1
March 12th, 2022
I grew irritated of the name “Rusty Capper” and the idea of a war-style shooter game. After playing various bullet hell games, one thing I realized I liked a lot about those games were that they were very addictive and were visually intriguing.
I came up with the name “Killemony” sometime around early 2022 after combining the words “Killing” and “Ceremony” as a means to come up with a catchy, one-word, short name title. Originally, this version of Killemony had the 50 MAPS to play through. The game also claimed to an open-world game, although it had deviated into linear stages pieced together like puzzles, which wasn’t open-world at all.
2023
Sometime between late 2022 and early 2023, the story, setting, and environment changed for Killemony. Because of this, the old place and idea was replaced with a newer version. The setting and environment were the biggest changes between V1 and V2. Instead of maps being influenced from various places around the world, it was heavily downsized to predominately US culture and geography. The plot progression of the story also changed from a “Rags to Riches” self-serving genocide to an “Overcoming the Monster” strategic killing spree with cheeky American archetypes sprinkled in. The maps changed too. The number of maps in the game were drastically downsized from 50 maps to 24 maps. 13 out of the 16 final maps were realized in this build:
- Flogeo
- Cuttingpines (now Gunpines)
- Boomavile
- Heartsfield (now Heartrange)
- Rud Smokes
- Jessix
- Dearcy
- Robin Winters
- Mudkeech
- Waves (now Deep Drenches)
- Angeline
- Roast Coast
- Magmarvelous
But they were grouped far differently from the final game, in the form of countries. In the final game, they technically are countries, but the game doesn’t refer to the map clusters as countries that often.
One of the most crucial changes in V2 was the option to play as 3 characters instead of one:
- Dogface (now Pups)
- Kennerick
- Len Dopper
Before this, the player was only going to play as their roblox avatar. Each of the characters were given 5 sets of maps to journey with their own story contributing greatly to the main plot. In the end, all of their adventures join together in Magmarvelous. They transform into one superbeing and fight against Meganemesis.
This further brought the map count down from 24 to 16.
2023
Killemony FINALLY became an open world experience once I came to a realization that linear courses felt archaic in the game. It actually was a pretty jarring design decision that held the game back for years. Killemony was always going for a more open and smooth transition between each map, and linear stages conflicted that vision heavily. Linear stages were also taking up too much world space and left a lot of empty areas over linear paths. This build of Killemony transformed into a diorama-style experience. This offered so many benefits to Killemony’s developement. Maps and stage designs felt cohesive rather than divided, and asset placements looked livelier. But best of all, it made environment building way easier. Killemony started feeling more planned out, which was something the development lacked up until this point.
V2
November 2023
BUT THEN I TOOK ANOTHER LONG BREAK… however, this time it was because I worked on revitalizing some of my canceled games. I reworked both Push The Ball and Toon Villain. Push The Ball was transformed into a top-down, point-and-click game, and Toon Villain was renamed True Villain and upgraded with far superior assets and scripts. As surprising as it may seem, Push The Ball and True Villain were once cancelled projects before they were finished and released. But looking back, I realized I made so many great ideas that fell through due to shortcomings and overambitions, leaving me with broken hopes and dreams. For a while, all of my failed games ate at me like a parasite, but I had learned SO MUCH because of those endeavors, so now it was time to revitalize these titles.
KILLEMONY UNIVERSE
January 16th, 2024
Now that I had this redemption to bring back all of my promising cancelled games, I created a whole shared universe for all of them called the “Killemony Universe”. Now all of these games had a reason to be brought back. All the games share core items, some story plots and elements, references, and some location names. And now all of these games coexist figuratively in different settings under the same universe.
I still wasn’t working on Killemony at this point, but with this new universe, it gave me ideas on how to develop the game moving forward. True Villain is the reason Killemony Universe even became a thing, despite it being named after Killemony and Happydreamer using Killemony’s shared asset before the shared universe was created. It was during True Villain’s revitalization that I realized this could become a universe, since all these games were sharing the same core gameplay items and certain functionalities.
V3
July 2nd, 2024
V3 of Killemony was created because I learned so much 3D Modeling and OOP skills over the past year. The assets that were already in the game were underwhelming and too outdated.
All the new changes in V3:
– Tilesets are now planes instead of 3D polygonal blocks like in V1 and V2
I first used planes as ground tilesets in Obbies Evolved. Using planes as ground worked so well on that game that I added plane tilesets to this game as well, as it would make level creation far less stressful.
– Assets have better textures
– Now that I understand Object-Oriented programming greatly, V3 uses more OOP than in previous versions.
August 1st, 2024
After a boost of inspiration from playing Dungeon Shooter, I immediate stopped every other project I was working on and started working on V3. Every went just like how it did in previous builds, but with superior scripts and objects. V3 was off to a blazing start to say the least.
August 6th, 2024
From 2020 until 2024, a hidden “Settings” screen within the Main Menu screen could be accessed if the right mouse button or left shift button was pressed. It sounded cool on paper to compact the menu screen to just a splash screen with an either/or button press function, but I stopped doing this after realizing that most people would completely overlook this feature.
September 6th, 2024
I recreated Killemony’s soundtrack up to scratch to sound more enjoyable. For a couple of years, many of the songs in the game were very underwhelming. Despite Killemony being my most prized game project, it had my least favorite soundtrack for nearly all of its development until recently.
Rest of 2024
October was the month Killemony finally started to resemble the game it plays as today. I had been unemployed for 2 months at this point, so I had a lot of free time, and nearly all of it was spent watching gameplay I admire greatly and then coming up with tons of great ideas for Killemony. This allowed the game’s development to progress rapidly in just a few short weeks.
Killemony finally ceased a linear progression all around, meaning you can literally explore maps and play stages in any order, as long as you beat all the map bosses… BUT you don’t even have to do that. If you access and complete certain hidden levels in the game, you can literally skip huge segments of the game. And the cutscenes are designed to be rearranged in whatever order you play the game. That means Killemony is now a multi-layered, open-progression, and nearly unregulated open-world game, except for one thing…
THAT DARN CAMERA!
As I mentioned earlier on this page, Killemony started off as a top-down game. Well, that all changed early on. The top-down angle became bland after testing out earlier builds of Killemony. Instead, I changed the camera to a bird-eyes perspective, give the game more field of depth, hince why I called the game “Project Perspective Shooter” early on. But even that alone created a major confliction. “The camera is placed at a certain angle at any given time, but I want the game to be viewed from multiple angles, so what the heck do I do?”. I decided to make the camera rotatable, but only on a certain axis. If I made the camera fully controllable, it would complete kill the original design premise of the game in a major way. But doing this allowed the game to feel just a bit less confined without changing the game entirely.
Beta
2025
THIS BOARD IS NOT FINISHED. I WILL ADD AND REVISE AT A LATER DATE.