NeroVerse Interloper: Devlog #1

GamePower Network
4 min readApr 6, 2022

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Hey all! I’m Mike, Lead developer of Interloper and I’m excited to kick off our first Devlog! We’ll use these Devlogs to give you a behind the scenes look at the development of our upcoming PC title “NeroVerse Interloper”!

Game development is not easy and can take wild twists and turns during the entire lifecycle. Due to the ongoing chaos of this cycle, it’s sometimes difficult to share all the details about what we’re up to and how development is shaping up. That’s exactly why we’ve started this Devlog. We hope you continue to join us on this ride!

THE ROAD TRAVELED

So what is NeroVerse Interloper and how did we get here? Since this is the first Devlog, let me take a moment to answer that question. NeroVerse Interloper is a narrative driven PC game that will introduce players to the world(s) of NeroVerse. For those that may not know, NeroVerse is the metaverse that we’ve been working on for the past few months. Development for Interloper started December of 2021.

Now that development is in full swing, we are preparing for the next steps, which is team expansion. Currently the team behind Interloper consists of 2 individuals, Michael Rochester (COO) and myself Michael Huntington (CTO). We’re both co-founders of GamePower Network, the company behind this entire project!

Our team, left to right: Mike Huntingtin, Michael Rochester

As mentioned, we started development in late December of 2021 and we are now moving to a full production phase. We’ve nailed down what we want the game to be and how we’d like it to play. Our current focus is getting a gameplay demo out to our community to get initial feedback and play testing in.

BABY STEPS

The first steps into the development of a game is always shaky. Pre-production is always in flux and changes are a common occurrence. Interloper is no exception to that. We’ve gone through several idea iterations before landing on our current roadmap. We’ve even merged ideas from titles we previously planned into this one! But let’s not get too deep into how the process works and instead actually show you how the process is going!

First off pre-production has taken us quite a bit of time. With that being said, one of the first things we wanted to tackle for Interloper were the characters and the story. World building as played a big part in our development and the characters we’ve created for Interloper have taken a life of their own! We’ve tackled artwork and backstories for characters. Now we’re moving towards acquiring voice acting for these characters.

The main characters of Interloper

Gameplay is obviously another major subject that needed to be decided on very early. Interloper originally began as a fully 2D concept, however we quickly realized in order to tell this story to its fullest potential we need to immerse the players in a more cinematic and interactive way.

Image of the MetaSoft OS that players will use in-game.

As the Interloper, you will take on a first person view of the game world. We decided to go with first person view because it future proofs any Virtual Reality work we decide to do moving forward. Porting Interloper to the Oculus VR headset will be a lot easier this way.

THE ROAD AHEAD

Now that we’re in the thick of development, our next steps are growing the team and continuing to build the demo. We’ve already made huge strides in our level building tools and asset pipeline. Although Interloper’s initial release will be within the Unity game engine, we do plan to port the project to Unreal Engine 5 in the future.

Eagle view of the demo map in its early development

As we move forward we will dive into more specific topics regarding the development and progress. We know many of you have been looking forward to using your NeroBots and we’re excited to implement them into Interloper! We’ll have more on that soon!!

First person view of the demo map in its early development

The images of our demo level shows early work and a small slice of what the level will look like. We’re working on adding NPCs, Enemies and AI along the way. In the next Devlog we’ll give you a closer look into that as well.

To learn more about Interloper follow us on Twitter and visit the Interloper website! See you in the next Devlog!

Visit us online: NeroVerse Website

On Twitter: @gamepowernet and @NeroVerse

Join the Community: Discord

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