Vacuous (quickly derived placeholder title) delivers balls-to-the-wall hard, twitchy action game play based around guiding a space-bomb-ship through obstacle courses. Back in high school, I developed a small game called Vacuum and Force as a physics project; Vacuous acts as the spiritual successor to that title. I'm usually not too keen on making the same thing again; however, in the case of Vacuum and Force I had always felt that I hadn't come anywhere close to tapping its full potential. Through Vacuous, I intend to rectify this.
With Vacuous now out of the prototyping stage and issued into full-scale production, I thought it was time to start a dev-log on its progress for the purposes of organizing my thoughts and raising awareness (shameless marketing scheme). With this log entry, I will quickly describe the base premise of the game and then discuss some of the development process for the prototype.
In Vacuous, the player controls a spherical space-ship with four thrusters.
Each thruster corresponds to a given arrow key (or d-pad direction). Using these thrusters, the player carefully guides the ship through a series of hazards in an environment devoid of gravity and friction. This ship houses a touch-sensitive bomb; if it bumps into anything it explodes and the stage must be reset.
I have no ambitions to drench this relatively simple, arcade-y concept in a sludge of story stuff. My intuition says that Vacuous will be better without such (I mean not to dis narrative components in games generally speaking, mind you). All I will introduce is a basic premise revolving around freedom fighters in a gravity-less universe using millions of these bomb-ships to remotely destroy mind control devices installed by a corrupt state. The player's task? Destroy all of the mind control machines. Thus, beat all of the game's levels to win.
This screen capture from the prototype displays the variety of elements which compose the levels in Vacuous. Lasers, cannons, spinning walls, force fields, attractors, rejecters, and a few others which will remain nameless can be seen in this prototyping stage. Do not use this image to infer what the actual level design will look like; I know what is shown here is a mess. The purpose of such a chaotic stage was to test the interactions of game elements at a maximum complexity, looking to see what interactions would create problems.
Another interesting part of the prototype development involved the creation of a system which allowed for easy scripting of world elements to translate, rotate, and scale, allowing for all sorts of different hazards to be implemented swiftly. The nodes (small circles with arrows) in the above image are used to define and control this behavior.
For Vacuous, I decided to go with Game Maker Studio as my main development tool for several reasons. First, I have a strong familiarity with older versions of the software. Second, I got the Standard version for free and the Pro version for $25, making it a significantly cheaper option than Unity (an engine for which I had developed two Vacuous prototypes, one 3D and the other 2D). Third, though I roughly have the programming experience to either start from scratch or pick-up a free framework, I don't have too much interest in all the extra work that path would entail (and so far, I don't see what major benefits it would offer a rather mundane project such as this). I am interested to see how well Game Maker can handle my use of HD sprite work, since most games I see made with the program use pixel art. So far, it fairs well.
I hope that Vacuous can reach the level where I feel comfortable releasing it as commercial product (a first for me). For my next goal, I need to design a tileset system which allows for both well designed and beautiful levels, amongst other things. Onwards!
Looking good so far. Good luck with developing it further.
Thanks!