Operation: Martian Clone

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Some Background:

I had played around in GameMaker 8 previously, but never got to in to it – mainly because I was inexperienced with game development at the time. But I always followed the GameMaker community – notably this subreddit and occasionally checking the forums. Despite my fascination with GameMaker, eventually I would go on to teach myself Unity and C#, so upon revisiting GameMaker (giving in to the temptation of the Humble Bundle this past summer), I felt infinitely more comfortable with it than my time with it before. The ease of picking up GML after doing everything in C# for the past few years astonished me; and it seemed like they had a function for everything. Now armed with knowledge, I created a game by building on an existing “engine”. While this helped get a basic understanding of GML and how to work with GameMaker, I never feel as comfortable building on someone elses codebase. So I set out to create my own from the ground up…

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Adventure Jam 2017 – The Artifact Isle

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Up to this point I have only participated in one other game jam – the One Button Jam on itch.io so when I caught word of the Adventure Jam on GameJolt, I decided to have another go at one. The decision came after playing Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild and experimenting with an open world in Unity. I decided I could use what I learned in these experiments to to make more than just a tech demo – an actual game. When I reached this conclusion, the jam wouldn’t begin for another 2 weeks but I was free to plan everything out before then. I really didn’t have an idea for a story at this point, but I knew I wanted it to involve puzzle-based trials (like Zelda’s shrines) so I just had to find a reason for them to exist. I tossed around a few ideas but eventually landed on:

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Conquest Combat

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I (finally) finished up work on a small little side project of mine, a top-down shooter called: Conquest Combat. This was one I started a while ago but only worked on here and there. True to game development though, it seemed to take a lot longer to get it to a finished state than I would have thought! Between tweaks to the AI and level balance, I would say about 1/4 of the development time was spent on these final touches.

The story is: Terrorist camps have begun to show up all over the place and we are left with just one option: send in our mediocre soldiers to stop them. Due to budget cuts, not only did boot camp training have to be scaled way back, but the intelligence has to be gathered by more cost-effective methods (translation: the internet). Despite this, a number of terrorist camps have been located and flagged for elimination. We need you to take these men and do just that (to the best of your ability)!

The game takes place all on a single screen where you control a single soldier and must follow/lead your fellow soldiers up against the enemy. Upon death you will respawn (if you still have allies alive), however your cohorts will not. Some missions you will have the ability to call in reinforcements while others you will only be able to use what you start with.

Controls are simple: WASD movement while the mouse will aim/fire.

Download it here!

The Journey to Steel Ego

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Anyone who follows me should know that I love my side projects! After a certain point however they become more than just a side project and end-up being another full-fledged project. This is another example of that happening. What originally started off as a “just for fun” project quickly evolved in to something I enjoyed playing as much as I did working on it.

Inspiration for this project came from Nuclear Throne. After (finally) playing it, I found myself hooked – but I couldn’t quite pinpoint why. More often than not I would find the difficulty way too steep, but I kept coming back for more. I quickly found myself hooked (and as a byproduct, inspired).

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Steel Ego (Alpha 0.4)

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Anyone who follows me should know that I love my side projects! After a certain point however they become more than just a side project and end-up being another full-fledged project. This is another example of that happening. What originally started off as a “just for fun” project (inspired by playing Nuclear Throne) quickly evolved in to something I enjoyed playing as much as I did working on it.

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Broken Images in Old Blog Posts

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My apologies for the broken images in all of my older blog posts; I just now discovered them. This was a result of the images still pointing to my old Besus Productions domain and of course the image links just couldn’t break and were instead replaced by a spam image. I have since gone through every single one of my old blog posts and updated their links to reference the image media file instead of using a custom URL to point to the image.

Sorry for the amateur appearance there for while. 🙁

Venturing out of my Unity Comfort Zone

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besusplatformer_3For over the last 3 years, I have exclusively worked in Unity 3D for all of my indie game creations, but a few years ago before I learned to use it, I had begun a project in Gamemaker 8 (which eventually got ported to Unity after I had become increasingly familiar with Unity). In August of 2016, I would again revisit Gamemaker: Studio by downloading the free version and after playing around (translation: getting lost) in it for a bit, I had gotten my fill. Enter the insane deal on the Gamemaker Humble Bundle and the itch to explore Gamemaker would show-up again. After a couple of days contemplating the purchase, I bit the bullet and went for it (the included source code files were the tipping point since they would serve as examples for me to see how the engine was structured).

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