Hi everyone! I'm Maeve, a game developer from Loco Motion Devs, introducing our latest project: Elements Divided, a multiplayer elemental fighting game. You can apply for the beta starting today! Our team worked on this project full-time for over 10 months, and we're thrilled to share it with you!
Following Superfly’s release on Quest App Lab in June of 2022, we started thinking about what the next game should look like. We had a lot of fun with the elemental superpowers from Superfly: throwing fireballs, shooting lightning, making giant trails of ice. After an intense internal company Game Jam, the clear winner was a concept called “Elements VR”, a singleplayer roguelike horde fighter where you wield element based (*gasp* who could’ve guessed?) powers. Sound familiar? This concept is what went on to become Elements Divided.
While the game has evolved a lot since then, it still has the same core function: Become a powerful master of the 4 classical elements, Water, Earth, Fire, and Air. Some of you might think, “Hey, this sounds familiar to a certain popular cartoon from the mid 2000s!”. And you would be right! We were huge fans of the Avatar: The Last Airbender universe when we started Elements Divided. 👀 To clarify, we're not creating an Avatar: The Last Airbender fangame. We were inspired by the show, but drew from other sources as well, incorporating our own twists on all the elements. The concept of element manipulation in the show looked like so much fun, and we wanted to bring that feeling of fantastical power to everyone.
You’ll also be happy to hear that we’ve finally listened to you - Elements Divided is MULTIPLAYER! While Superfly wasn’t built to handle it, we made sure this time to implement multiplayer from the get-go. (Meaning, I screamed at our studio head, Rory, until he relented 😉) Our game has you join a fictional elemental fighting tournament to battle your friends (or strangers!) in a randomized modular arena. Each battle lets you pick Water, Earth, Fire, or Air, each of which has a totally different set of abilities and combos. Duke it out, master the elements, and climb the leaderboard to be crowned the true Champion of the Elements! Or, at least the true champion of your friend group. 😜
Alternatively, use our Co-Op mode to practice your skills, battling dangerous AIs alongside your friends! Yes, you read that correctly, our game has Co-Op too! “But,” I hear you saying, “What if none of my friends are online?”. Oh, don’t worry your little head, Elements Divided is SINGLEPLAYER compatible too! Our Co-Op mode scales based on the number of players in game, so even if it's just yourself, you can still have a great time.
With all that being said, our PvP game modes are the main focus of Elements Divided. Co-Op and Singleplayer are offered as fun game modes for those times when you just want something a little different. Or, if you don’t feel like absolutely destroying your friends with your masterful S+ tier skills. Cause you know, winning all the time gets tiring. 😉 However, once you’re done taking a break from bodying anything and anyone that gets near you, you can try out our multiple different PvP game modes. We’re thinking about including at least a team deathmatch mode and a gem collecting mode, but we’re still looking at the options. What modes do you want to see?
So, you might be thinking, why make this game? Why not work more on Superfly? Why now? Well, I finally have the answer to those questions. Our team has been working on finishing up Superfly for a long time now. It’s a running joke at this point, “Just one more update, then we’re done!”, since, well, we’ve done this about 4 or 5 times now.
In all honesty, we’ve been working on Superfly for several years now. Don’t get me wrong, we still see all of your ideas and suggestions come in every day, and we love them, but we’re really happy with the state Superfly will be left in. The team was beyond ready to move on to a new project and really get those creative juices flowing again.
So, we then picked this idea because it was one that truly excited everyone on the team. Not only did we like the idea, we knew at least some of our players liked it too… Because we’ve seen almost all of your requests come in over the years, and trust me, we all think it’s a little bit funny every time we get a request for “a power where you can control air” or “the ability to bend metal” while we’ve been secretly working on Elements Divided for the last several months.
As for “Why now?”... Well, we’ve been working on Elements Divided since May of 2023, which was at the same time we planned to stop development on Superfly. That was a very long time to keep this a secret from everyone! In reality, that’s how long it took to get Elements Divided in a state that we were proud to show you guys. Not only that, we’re finally at the point where we need your help, to test, give feedback, find bugs, and most importantly, to have fun!
Well, that’s all I can share with you for now, and we appreciate you sticking it out till the end. If you want to follow the future of Elements Divided, you can check out all of our other platforms or keep checking right here on locomotiondevs.com for more dev blogs like these. You can also still apply to join the beta of Elements Divided until it fills up!
And finally, I wanted to say a thank you to everyone who has ever played Superfly. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I would be here all these years later, writing the first dev blog for our second game. Or even making a second game! And it’s all thanks to you, our players, that we’re here. So from the bottom of my heart, from all of our hearts at Loco Motion Devs, I want to say a sincere thank you. We really couldn’t have done it without you.
Until next time y’all,
Maeve