After six months of development, the game I’ve been working on has finally been released on Steam!
Foreign Legion: Buckets of Blood is a fast-paced, cartoony third‑person shooter. Missions range from defending an oil pipeline against waves of attackers, to escorting a bus packed with tourists driving through hostile territory.
I created most of the levels and 3D environment art.
The escort mission at dawn is one of the prettier levels I made.
We built the game with Unity 2.6, and all characters, weapons, and environment assets modeled in Blender 2.49. I’ve been experimenting with Unity on my own for a while, but Unity’s Windows release in March motivated everyone at the studio to try a small project. I made a quick design document, while everyone else got familiar with the engine.
Early iterations of our custom third‑person character controller back in March.
We soft‑launched a Mac version in July, only a few months after starting development, and were featured in Apple’s top downloads for the month. The Steam release took longer, Unity didn’t have Steamworks integrations yet, so we built our own and polished the game further along the way.
Featured 9th place in Apple’s top downloads.
We also shipped a browser version via the Unity web player on Netlog, a Belgian social media platform, as one of the launch titles for their gaming hub. They are the first platform to adopt microtransactions in Europe, the game is free to play while guns and ammunition are available for purchase. I’m not a fan of that business model, but time will tell.
Local newspaper coverage of the Steam release and our presence at GDC.
Right now I’m prototyping levels for the upcoming multiplayer update using Valve’s “orange box” technique, which I used in my Half-Life 2 modding days. We’re also in early talks with Sony about a potential PlayStation 3 version, which would be really cool.
Prototyping a Middle Eastern city level with the typical keel arches.
This year our studio had a small booth at GDC, the Game Developers Conference in Cologne, Germany. A highlight for me was chatting with Nicholas Francis, one of Unity’s founders, he seemed ecstatic seeing indie teams like us push his engine. Also, shout‑out to the many cool game dev students from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden!
Me, second from the left, sharing stories with other developers at GDC.
Creating small games with a tiny team is chaos, but a lot of fun.