Please follow link below for details and some more images  (I posted in help wanted for Steam Page Graphics).

/t/6410619/artpaid-steam-page

Game has been in development for some 6 months (solo developer) and I'm hoping for general release Sept / Oct 26 on Steam.  This is a Bullet Hell Rogue Lite Construction Kit with endless playability.  Supports local Co-op mode, AI computer mode, Squad Mode (management strategy) and of course single player modes.  All mods you make to the game can be exported and your friends can import your creations.

I will be creating a website which will hold your creations in due time when game is released along with my own creations.

Game is around 70% complete.  Working on more weapons and more effects at the moment and bug fixes and some improvements to the modding of hazards within arenas.  Development is pretty hectic so hoping to start adding to this devlog moving forwards - something I wished I started months back in fairness but having a job also I've not had a lot of time, I know, no excuse really!  

Many thanks!

Just been optimising, so in went some spatial partition trees (ended up using a quad tree for enemy collision/updates) vast improvements over original BSP I had been using a few months back.  Some new weapons have now also been added - mainly ice staff, magic wand, water bucket and tar bucket.

Will call it a day for now, my head getting a bit dazed (I suffer from epilepsy and need be careful with my screen time).

Hopefully tomorrow, couple more weapons - although we do have quite a lot and lots of variety, failing that will be some bug fixes to the UI.

Quick update on what I now intend to start work on tomorrow after planning a lot of stuff down this afternoon.  But, first, just so you are aware, my background is that of a senior full-stack developer with a lot of software team lead and technical lead experience along with many years of software architecture.

A Community Mod Portal..... broadly speaking...

As my game already has the hard part in place: game-side export and import of mod workspaces, weapon packs, enemy packs, arena packs, sprites, and workspace manifests etc,  the right next step is not a generic file-sharing site, but for now a validated package portal built around the same exported pack structure the game already understands.

So, I am thinking of doing this in 3 steps:

• A web portal where creators upload exported mod packages
  
• A validation and packaging backend that inspects uploads, extracts metadata, and stores approved versions
• An in-game browser/downloader later, after the web upload and moderation flow is stable

So, the first public version should support things like: 

• creator account signup/login
• upload a mod package ZIP or exported workspace folder ZIP
• automatic validation and metadata extraction
• searchable mod pages
• versioned downloads
• local import through the existing game importe
  

Wow, quite a lot to implement but I do have time on my hand and this will make the game more awesome in my opinion although I am biased!

I am thinking of one canonical package format for public uploads, this would include json, sprite assets, backgrounds etc within a zip file.

The website architecture will fall in having both Frontend and Backend work.

Frontend

Use a normal web app.

Good options:

• Next.js for the public site and creator dashboard
• Vanilla React frontend

Backend

• API service for auth, metadata, search, downloads, moderation
• Relational database for metadata and moderation state

There is a lot more to think about in regards to the above which I've yet to note down, but stuff like database model, upload validation pipeline, security rules, compatibility strategy, import strategy in the game, API's (Read-only endpoints)...

As you can see, this is a lot of work and I've not got it all down as of yet...

It seems a lot of work, but I'm sure the end result if executed correctly it will be great for the mod players of Alien Hordes.  Imagine, they can do all the creation/mods within the game and then upload to this web portal for all to see and import into the base game of Alien Hordes - wow, could even have a payment option as they would have spent time on doing this and also created a lot of graphic assets for their mods. 

Anyway, that is enough for this post, hope you are interested in this project :-)