I read somewhere that people like dev blogs, so I'm going to do it. Here's how it's gonna work out in this case. I'm going to try and post some stuff about the latest content in Miner Threat every week. I don't know when, but every week. I would love if people gave their input on the game and give some pointers as to what you would like the game to look like.
But I can't start the dev blog with nothing, can I?
So since you have nothing to base this week off, I'll give you Miner Threat's backstory. Learn how I decided to make this game.
So at the start of summer, I had nothing left to do. I had just finished my school year, and an excellent year of Game jolt games. You can check out my Game jolt here, All of the games on my page at the time of writing were done during the school year. Anyway, I love the roguelike genre, and making a such a game would really test my programming skills versus the semi-mindless-to-program games I put on Gamejolt. Not that they were easy to make, it's just that I've been using Gamemaker for so long I can translate small ideas into games quite quick. In fact, Starbourne Rogue was made in a total of 6 hours. 2 of those in a programming class (Where I don't really actually work, I just do what I feel like) and I had a friend play testing the whole time. So Starbourne Rogue got polished up and sent out in a total of 6 hours.
But back to Miner Threat. I decided that I wanted to make a platformer, after all, that's one of my favorite genres, then it would have lots of guns, lots of items, and lots of enemies. So I did. In the first couple builds, it works fine, I had the core gameplay down, and most of the game's different feature's APIs down. So what next? The dungeon generator, then more content, implementation in the game, then polish. So I immediately dived into the dungeon generator. (Really just a cave generator.) I had no idea what to do. I kept making a bunch of trash algorithms that produced terrible, inconsistent, bad caves. In the end, I had remade The Cave Project, code name for it's cave generator, 5 or 6 times. The final version is chunk based which produces much more believable caves with any amount of realism I wanted. I could just add 100+ chunks to keep the caves interesting.
So now that I had the dungeon generator's core down, I stopped working on it, and started adding content and fixing up little things. For a few days I sat on Promotion and Gimp pushing out graphics for new items, guns, and other things. Now there is like 5 enemies, 15 guns, and 10 or so items. More will be added, it's just a base to start off with.
After that I needed some stuff that I couldn't produce. I needed some audio and some graphics. And I can only nag my graphics friend, Daniel, so much before he gets pissed off at me. So I stopped by the Gamemaker Marketplace and picked up 2 assets, a cave tileset, which I used one tile, and some of the little sprites, and an 8-Bit sound pack. Basically just for the explosion sound. I was okay with that, because it only costed me around $2.50 CAD, and I can use the assets in the future. I just modified one of the Cave Tileset tiles to be a middle block and ran it through a tileset generator so you can have the nice-looking smooth environment. When you boot up the game, it runs an auto tiling script to change the wall tile to the proper one to look flush with the environment rather than a bunch of squares.
But that's pretty much where we are at right now. Next week I will deliver some more updates on what's happening with it. In the mean time, drop any suggestions for Miner Threat in an email to me.
Thanks for reading
