Hello everyone,
I am a (majorly) solo developer designing, programming, and managing CrabbleUp in my free-time. I am using some media assets made by others because I am no musician, or graphics artist, and I got help for translations, and testing, but otherwise this project is made by me only. I have already spent a couple thousand hours on this passion project, and I will spend a lot more to reach a state that I consider "ready". Until then, the game is in development, breaking changes are possible, and all feedback can be quickly iterated upon.
Price and where to download
The game is free to play until the final version, as in actually free: no ads, no microtransactions, no spam. You can get the game on Crabbleup.itch.io, and if you donate $10 or more before the final version is out, I will send you a key for the final, full-price release.
As the game is free to play, I am not releasing a demo, but you can also check out the alpha release trailer to get a better view about the game.
Here's also a sneak peek for the co-op mode:
Features
- The game is inspired by my favourites from the 90's, with some modern twists. You get to explore a 2d, isometric maze as a hermit crab, and use your bubbles as weapons.
- The music is chill, and the game is quite laid back, but that doesn't mean it will be easy!
- Supports Windows and Linux operating systems.
- Supports keyboard and controller inputs.
- Supports 3 languages (so far).
- With the latest version, you can play together with another player on the same machine.
- You can play a multiple levels, fight jellyfish, and the first boss.
- There's a skill tree with multiple paths and mechanics to unlock.
- You can find treasure with some bonus content.
Current limitations
Content in general is limited, this will be much improved in the next release: more bosses, more enemies, more languages, more everything!
Tech details (for those interested)
This game is built on the Qt framework, written in C++. I design & write the code myself, apart from:
- the framework features (OS communication, and window creation),
- the GoogleTest framework,
- a couple functions from Boost.
Excluding those libraries, the project is currently ~25k lines of code, and ~20k lines of tests.
The game runs blazingly fast (600-1000 fps) using mostly a single CPU core, and no GPU acceleration. A game without GPU acceleration, you ask? Yes. I ran trials experimenting with GPU acceleration before, but the cost was higher than the gain because the objects in the game are small and simple. I will keep evaluating GPU support in later versions, and see if it helps the performance, or hurts it.
Cheers!
