Awww… did you miss us?

Welcome to my devlog! Today, I’ll be introducing my next project:

FriendOS, the Friend-full operating system!

A wide shot of Bliss, showing multiple Friends: Moondog, mcdonalds, and Rover. (A development shot of Bliss, where the Friends roam)

I’ve had the honor of working on this project with some of my development peers (Sketched, Mailman, and a few others).

Today, I’ll give a high-level preview of what the game will be about, alongside some cool development insights.

What is FriendOS?

FriendOS is a once-abandoned operating system, now brought to life by you! The keeper of this world, ASTRON, will be supporting your operating experience.

(Meet ASTRON, your Friendly Assistant!)

But this world is unstable. Your entry to this system has disabled the FIREWALL, permitting modern viruses to invade, corrupting many inhabitants of Bliss!

You and your Friends will have to form a makeshift arsenal to beat the shit out of em!!

Gameplay wise, you can expect a bit of both Webfishing and ATLYSS. The Bliss overworld will be large with many opportunities for casual social interactions (card games, fishing, etc). The dungeons will be much more active and cooperative.

Expect difficulty ranging from accessible to pawesome

Networking

FriendOS will be an open-server, singleplayer/multiplayer MMO.

Players can easily host and join overworld lobbies through Steam. From there, you can run dungeon sub-servers with other Friends. Your experience is stable, even if the Bliss server closes.

This game has been made from scratch in Godot, and I’ve put many months into inventing a custom multiplayer framework for supporting it: Meet Godaemon.

Making an MMO is next to impossible for a small team, but Godaemon is a super-advanced tool for developing large multiplayer games, especially MMO-viable ones, so I feel very equipped for producing this project.

(Also, Steam is optional for playing — direct IP connections are supported, just a bit less reliable.)

Welcome to Bliss

Your home, Bliss, serves as a connection across the entire system.

The Bliss landscape is vast with a distinct cartoon aesthetic. Plenty of environment to run around in, and you can throw baseballs at whoever you want. The world is your oyster.

(Throw Baseballs anywhere you go)

To expedite in crafting this large world, I’ve spent many Moons developing a specialized 3D level editor. Building and editing a large scene is quick and easy, and supports gorgeous lightmaps.

(Extremely fast 3D level design)

Tools like these are critical for production. It won’t take very long for us to build a beautiful world for you.

Friends

The Friends are a jovial force in the universe.

Each critter in Bliss is a Friend. You can create unlimited Friends and play as any of them.

While the Friend Maker is still in development, it’s almost done, and I’m incredibly happy with how it has come together. It is very easy to create a very silly abstract animal, and the control offered is simply ridiculous.

The Friend Maker, featuring a Friend called "exotic fabrication". They are a blue/green deer with a rainbow tail and a big nose wearing a cowboy hat, a graduation cap, a $1 glove, a red hoodie, and one sock. (Meet my beautiful deer)

The Friend Maker is really fun. Here are some of its features:

Fast and efficient. Menuing is minimal, UX is a priority.
Model sliders, enabling dynamic model control and variation.
‘Mix-and-Match’ all body parts — composite everything.
Everything is recolorable, including accessories.
Accessories dynamically stack. Your hat tower awaits.
Designed by me and Mailman, so you know it’s good

Overall, Friends are a very simple and cute blank slate. You are given maximum control to create your beautiful Friend. I am very excited to see what people will make with it.

Dungeons ‘n Battles

The battle content of this game is very important to get right. However, it is still in the oven, so I can’t show anything off yet.

This is because this game’s development has been very, very experimental. The battle system has been remade five times.

While I already find the current iteration incredibly engaging, you must know that I am very picky. So it’s not ready yet.

Still, I can give you some points of what to expect:

Procedurally generated 3D dungeons, in a way never before seen
Multiplayer bullet hell, not turn-based.
No down-time in battle
Cooperative Lethal League

I hope this gives you a good idea of what we’re looking to do. It is still tricky to execute a concept like this, and we’re needing to experiment with a ton of variations to make it enjoyable.

I hope you’ll find it fun!

What’s Next?

In eight months of development, we are led by the carnal desire to beat the shit out of a computer. Our experience will allow you to embrace this rage alongside us!

Still, development has been rather slow. We’ve spent a lot of time crafting infrastructure and tools to build the game, along with prototyping many ideas for what might be fun.

In eight months, it really feels like we have made five separate games. As such, the current game is somewhat bare bones.

But this exploration has been super healthy for us! It’s allowed us to find a good footing and medium for expression.

It will take a lot more time to get the game made, but we’re truly on the cusp of building this little world out.

If you’d like to keep tabs on development, I might post updates sporadically on my Bluesky. There’s no steam page or public Discord server yet, so this is the best you’ll get.

I’ll end this post with a couple more previews.

(One of many overworld themes for Bliss)

(Reviving a perished Friend)

A comic of two Friends harassing Ferris Wheels. (A short comic by Mailman, featuring bliss resident Ferris Wheels)