Old, old prototypes [part 2]

Cauldrons, plants, potions, and a big eyed lady protagonist. The more things change, the more things stay the same. Sometimes I wonder if I will keep on attempting to make the same game again and again for the rest of time.

This was the big project I was working on towards the end of uni (It wasn’t a game degree, so I had to make these in my free time). The game is rendering the sprites using 3d shells with a (near) perfect projection. Using the cutout method and a z-buffer to handle the sorting. This eliminates most of the horrible sort-order conflicts of isometric tiling, but I could never get the projection to be quite stable. A slight but somewhat nauseating shake effect would occur every time the character moved.

In the end I did not have the skills to bring the project to a workable state. My colours were muddy, my art lumpy, my coding subpar (or, at least insufficient for the scope I was aiming for). But part of me cannot help but love the strange mess in all its wonky glory.

Old, old prototypes [part 1]

Last week I was searching my old hard disk for some assets when I stumbled over my Gamedev folder from when I was in university. Seeing how the old drive might not live for much longer, I decided it would be a good time to export some clips and store them in various places on the interwebs. There exists a frightening heap of Game Maker projects which I worked on before these, but the versions of the software that is required to play them no longer works. So those projects might already be lost to time.

Most of my work during uni was isometric, an art-style which I still adore. However, the programming isometric graphics is something I have little love for. It’s one of the reasons almost all of my work for the last few years has featured mostly flat and overhead perspectives. One cannot adequately express in words the sheer fiddliness of isometric tiling when combined with moving objects, fences, and thin walls. But man, it does look gorgeous.

Dragging Dungeons releases tomorrow!

Trailer Dragging Dungeons – YouTube

• Follow the recently beheaded Evelin, heir to the royal throne, after she re-awakens in a muddy dungeon.
• Click & drag to combine objects, and carve a new empire from the bowels of the earth.
• Grow and harvest plants, smelt and craft new materials, fish for eldritch crustaceans, interact with peculiar monsters, and much more.

You can subscribe to my itch.io or twitter to be notified when it releases.

Current favourites

Some of my favourite tracks from last year.

Random stuff from the last few months

Since bright steel came out I have made various prototypes, and most of them where quite nice, but not really what I wanted to be spending my time on for an entire year. Still figuring out what I do want to do. Below are some samples.

Random Arty-things

Bright Steel

The boss of the neighbouring dungeon has insulted your cat over twitter. This injustice cannot stand! Drop whatever productive work you were doing and correct this dishonour.

But I won’t be easy. The evil cat denouncer has deployed her army of spamspider followers. Now your twitter feed is flooded gifs of her ugly dog. Disgusting! Expunge them all.

Features:

• Repeatedly stab annoying chibi spamspiders.
• Randomly generated dungeons.
• Get combo-ed into spike traps and insta die.
• Refuse to use a controller even though I told you it works better that way.
• Fight a challenging boss at the end.
• Get confused why nothing mentioned in the synopsis above is in the game.

Get it for free on itch.io!

Old art

Old artwork I made in times long passed. I should go back to daily practice someday.

Some old game prototype screenshots

Well, not ‘that’ old, these were probably around 2017-2018 or something like that.

Life Dot Lock

An interactive fiction prototype about bad feelings and hacking. Follow Guus on his Friday evening as he tries to reflect on his opinions towards his colleague.

Get it for free on itch.io.