In August of this year I wrote about how I was working on a new video game, a love letter to a game of my youth, Snow Bros. I am now able to report that this game is now finished. This game is not one that I wanted to make for profit but rather to just challenge myself and to improve my programming and art skills.

The scope of my game is significantly smaller than that of Snow Brothers. Snow Brothers had 100 levels, with a boss fight on every 10th level, my game follows a similar pattern, but it only has 10 levels, with the single boss fight on the 10th level.

Despite this difference I am proud to say that I managed to finish it, and just as proud to say that I completed all of the programming and artwork myself (with the exception of the player character, Aaron Sokolowski gave me a bit of help with that). I have built 3 different enemies that behave differently, a boss fight, an intro and ending cut scene.

The music and sound effects for this game were taken from https://opengameart.org. This is a site that I would highly recommend for any game developer who needs some assets from an area that they are not skilled in.

I am quite satisfied with how this game came together, and with how easy it was to finish this game using Gamemaker Studio 2.

Until Next Time
– Steven

Like with my Pixel Kitchen, I decided to work on this new project with Gamemaker Studio, but I am using the updated version, Gamemaker Studio 2. So far I have found working in Studio 2 a very pleasant experience and thankfully most of what I had learned in 1.4 directly translates over to 2.

The first thing that immediately jumped out at me is that the User Interface is so much better when compared to the previous version. Instead of having a horrible mess of windows and popups layered on top of one another, items are organized into a single work-space. You can specify if your project is going to be a Drag and Drop project or a GML (aka coding) project, this lets you bypass the step of having to drag a code action into a game object.

I am still doing pixel art in Aseprite instead of the built-in graphics editor; but, the new graphics editor is still a very useful pixel art and animation editor. I have found myself making quick modifications to sprites directly inside of Gamemaker Studio 2 because it is faster that having to open up Aseprite, export a sprite sheet and re-import into Gamemaker.

Speaking of pixel art, I have been trying to work around my limitations as an artist. I have been designing characters and enemies out of really simple and basic shapes, but complex enough to still give them some character. Most of my enemies are built out of a series of circles, but sometimes I walk on the wild side and throw a triangle into the mix.

Environments have been a little bit more of a challenge for me. What I ended up doing to be able to make the different levels was designing an incredibly simple pattern and repeating it for the whole level. It looks simplistic and basic, but this game is designed to be a clone of a NES game that I liked as a child, so on some level I think that it fits the aesthetic perfectly.

Development of this game is progressing smoothly and I hope to have more to discuss about it sometime soon.

Until Next Time
– Steven