I spent the last 2 weeks on a “let’s see if I can do it” project with no intention of releasing something. Yesterday, however, I decided to drop that and make a game with the intention of releasing it.
The easiest thing to achieve for a one-man project was simple 2d stuff, so I tested a few ideas and I went with a dual stick shooter type of game.
I plan on doing a little bit of behind the scenes stuff like documenting progress, depending on how much people actually care.
Here is the day 1 prototype, not much happening, but still:
I am still not sure where this will go gameplay wise, but as always, I will keep iterating until the mechanics on its own are fun enough to play around with and then add gameplay that is rewarding.
So it’s still undecided if it will just be a record hunt arena type of game or if it’s going to be more like a rogue like progress style of game where you have to fight from arena to arena and upgrade to fight an end boss.
Day 2 is done and I will remember it as particle madness - or something along those lines.
I just worked on the visuals to get them out of the way. With the base done, I can finally go full into programming the next few days and actually produce more gameplay.
Here is the day 2 video:
Yeah, I actually never saw that game before, just found out about it while doing research on dual stick shooters. I was pretty amazed by the visuals. The grid is just amazing.
But anyways. I don’t know if I stick to this style, when I started I had a bit more retro, you know… a bit more squares, in mind, but for the moment this style is really easy to handle and gives me a nice pipleline with literally no modeling or texture work to do, while providing a nice style.
Anyways, I have some plans for the gameplay that will kinda give it it’s on place in the twin stick shooter world.
I would definitely try to make this as unique as possible. If you haven’t, I would recommend researching stick shooters and trying to come up with a different dynamic than what is currently available.
Would be good to do this before you start hard coding things in.
Here is an example of a really unique shooter (imo):
Yeah, I know Waves and it looks really good. I actually took the idea of the transparent ground from it, and put placeholder stuff down there
And Child of Eden looks fantastic, too. But I don’t like this game for serveral reasons.
I get headache in many scenes(proably coming from the lack of depth in the scene)
gameplay is dull, just shooting is basically boring
THE AMOUNT OF HANDCRAFTED CONTENT (that I am not able to create in decent amount of time)
Regarding uniqueness, while I appreciate your input, I don’t think uniqueness is something I care, or should care about. For me, fun in a (arcade’ish) game isn’t defined by uniqueness but rather by mechanics and content.
And well, I really want to keep this project as simple as possible artwise, because I really don’t want to waiste time on that, beeing a programmer I always see my motivation dropping in front of photoshop or 3ds max.
The reason why waves and geometry wars, resogun (and my stuff) looks the way it looks is because it’s easy to achieve for programmers. Make something explode, add some bloom and you are done
Well… way too much writing on this, I gotta go back to work
Mechanics and Content are defined by uniqueness…
Unless you copy everything from someone else that has already come up with unique Gameplay mechanics and unique Content.
Child of Eden was simply an example to see how visual effects, animation, and gameplay mechanics could be composed in such a way that it made the experience unique and memorable. I understand it isn’t a stick shooter. The idea was to encourage thinking outside the box. Many people have copied waves already and literally re-built the game from ground up. I am not saying you didn’t work hard to accomplish what you have, but I was trying to (as a friendly gesture), warn against what has already been done time and time again.
First off, I actually didn’t work hard, it’s sitting in front of a computer and doing what I do for fun after all
Yeah and I totally understand you. And I actually don’t like waves (from what I’ve seen in videos, haven’t played it yet). It just lacks a third dimension, gameplay wise, and so does geometry wars. In addition to that, nobody needs clones of games, but there is nothing wrong with taking the best ideas of the leading games of a genre and integrating it into your own stuff.
Best example is minecraft. Direct minecraft clones never had success, but games taking bits like the cube voxels, the building, the creative modes or even the build and fight against zombies at night ideas, while keeping their own identity had great success. For example Terraria/Starbound, Rust or Brick Force, to just name a few.
