So it's been about a month since I finished off the Mayan Mystery game. For the last week or so, I've not spent much time at all on the computer, and just took some time to relax a little....or tried to at least.
After working on the Mayan mystery for SO long, it was tough to just stop working on stuff. It gets to be a habit, so even after that game was finished, I was still looking at different options for what will follow down the line.
The next project is a continuation of the Mayan Mystery, and is going to be called Jetpack Justice! I've gone back and forth on whether or not the graphics should be retro (pixel) style, or hand drawn to match they style in the instruction manual. In the end, I decided that pixelated is best, based solely on the fact that when I was a kid, seeing the drawings of the bad guys in the instruction manuals was awesome, and then getting to see the videogame variant afterwards was just as exciting :)
Jetpack Justice is going to be a sidescrolling shooter, so the gameplay will be a big change from the metroidvania that was the Mayan Mystery. I don't want to reveal too much right now since it's 99% brainstorming at this point, but here is an early mock-up I did that I think gets the point across...
Those bad guys are Galactopods, and they're a caste-based species, so each variant has its own specific task that it carries out. I'm going to have to add a bunch more for variety's sake, but you get the general idea now, right? :)
You might be asking yourself, "Wait, how did Mitch get from inside a Mayan temple into outer space? And what the heck is Otis doing flying there beside him??"
For answers to questions like those, you'll just have to give the Mayan Mystery a try, otherwise I'd be giving too much secret info away!
