Game development updates April

It's been a long time coming but here's an official announcement:

Super Mansion Quest is on hold again.

There's many reasons behind this but the main ones are:
  • I was meant to be working on only one feature (making the guns feel good) and I got sidetracked
  • I don't really know how to create proper enemies that would suit the gameplay
  • The progress I was making felt really slow and I didn't have much enthusiasm for it
At the bottom of the post I have a partial list of what I achieved while working on it again.

What I actually want to talk about is what I've been up to in between putting the game on hold and now. It started off with wanting to make a platformer that's smaller in scope than Super Mansion Quest.

So I worked on a recreation of Super Mario Bros. World 1-1. I actually managed to get a fair amount done because there's not too much going on in that first level.

I didn't make an exact clone because the movement in Super Mario Bros. is very specific to that game and there was some other features I didn't really need to do for the platformer I wanted to make.

I used that project as the basis of the last game I was working on.
It was a platformer where you can shoot projectiles at enemies to make them move in specific ways, jumping, stopping, change directions, to solve puzzles.

It didn't go very far because at some point I became bored with the idea and then I had to deal with some life stuff. That's all worked out better than I expected, but I've spent most of my time dealing with it and playing games instead of making them.

Currently I'd really like to work on a project but doing it all by myself is really frustrating. I think if I could just discuss the design of a game with a programmer (that we both want to make of course) and then work on graphics I'd have a lot more fun.

So if anyone I know is looking for an artist to collaborate with, send me a message.

Anyway here's a list of what I did manage to achieve with Super Mansion Quest while I was working on it recently:
  • There's now a bunch of different guns with different effects
  • Some new areas and graphics
  • Slightly updated graphics
  • Replaced all the fonts object with a single pixel font object that is instance based
  • A slow motion mode (this might be an ability in the final game)
  • Streamlined the way to make guns then streamlined it again which meant I could edit gun properties while debugging
  • Updated the UI to display currently equipped weapon icons and associated button
  • Added a way to strafe while firing, this really improved how the game felt
  • Made a proper function for using the textbox so I could call it from anywhere

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