Thanks for your interest on my small passion driven project. For those who don’t know me, I was the main developer of several Portal maps and mods such as Blue Portals, A Little Higher, and Tornate. For the past few years, I’ve been exploring other gameplay opportunities. Some of them ceased development early in, others are planned to be explored by other developers. In this article, I want to share my plans and goals foe Cyclone.

Cyclone is a small first-person puzzle platformer using the Leadwerks Game Engine. Players are equipped with a device that allows the placement of cyclone vortexes to navigate rooms and solve puzzles. Fly across pits, sore in the air, or launch a box at a target. Cyclone offers a different take on the genre.

A crucial component of this project is to allow players to create new maps, elements, and overall experiment with possibilities. The modular tiled design of the test chambers make it easy to get the scale of rooms without knowing the exact numbers for dimensions. This aspect helped me when I first started map design. For example, a floor tile is 64x64 centimeters and wall panel is 128x256 centimeters. First time users can simply count the wall or floor tiles when they first start when it comes to scaling their rooms.

The all maps in Cyclone use the CSG system. Rooms can be easily created, adjusted during development. If you like your brush work, you can keep it! Thanks to the engine’s scene tree system, there is no requirement to replace your shell with models. Simple texture changes will be enough. 

From buttons to energy ball launchers, all game play mechanics are as simple as drag, drop, and link. This keeps the flow of creation fast and intuitive. 

Lastly, Cyclone allows the use of custom scripts thanks to the engine’s Lua sandbox system. Simply add a script to an entity and  the rest is to you! You can also add additional functions on top of the existing game classes. 

While information on available tools is not concrete right now, I can say that as of this article, custom maps can be easily loaded and played. The main thing I enjoyed making mods back in the day was that I was using the actual game development tools. I’m hoping to have news regarding this soon.

As for the release, the current plan is to ship with ten playable maps for an Early Access release on Steam by Q1 2022. While this date isn’t guaranteed, it’s a good time target as by then it’ll mark a full year of active development. From there, more Steam related features such as Steam Input, Workshop support, and additional content can take place. 

Please stay tuned for future updates!