So! Out of boredom and Glyph being not here, I decided I'd show a little history on how IS became the horrible monstrosity that you see today.
It all started on a dark and stormy night. Wait, no, it was actually a pretty normal day. I wanted to try to do something non-programming related for once, and I decided to do some art for the Destroy the World competition. Some random guy who I never actually knew before named Glyph PM'd me, and asked if I could do the art for his game. I agreed, and he took his sweet time to get IRC. Finally, days later, we started the project.
Session Start: Thu Oct 01 17:56:33 2009
Session Ident: Glyph
[17:56] Session Ident: Glyph (EsperNet, LazyWaffle) (kdwhas)
[17:56] <Glyph> Oh, Hi. How do you start a private chat thing?
01[17:56] <LazyWaffle> You just did
01[17:57] <LazyWaffle> If you use mIRC, double click someone's name or type in /query name
[17:57] <Glyph> Heh. Got it.
[17:57] <Glyph> Okay, well about the game,
01[17:57] <LazyWaffle> Right, any ideas yet?
[17:58] <Glyph> Yeah, but it's pretty much up in the air on most parts.
[17:58] <Glyph> Have you played Mario&Luigi:Bowser's inside story?
[17:58] <Glyph> (Or any of the series?)
01[17:58] <LazyWaffle> Nope
[17:58] <Glyph> Oh, well I was thinking of a similar battle system...
There you have it. The whole project was hinged on a flimsy story and a battle system. After a day or two, he showed me the battle system prototype. It was pretty rad, but it had its problems.
As you can see, it's all placeholder. And the ship was friggen' HUGE. You couldn't move up and down 3 vertical slots. The lasers acted as shields during the enemy's turn. It actually didn't bug me that much. But this is where I got the idea for the graphics.
I really didn't think I could pull off such huge sprites. It was intimidating. I wasn't even that skilled of a spriter. I decided to myself, "Oh hell with it, I'll just rip off Matt Thorson's style" and made An Untitled Story-esque MS Paint graphics. Glyph didn't have a problem with it, so I continued making more and more graphics. I wasn't really satisfied with them, but it was better than actually putting EFFORT into them.
Instead of making the huge ship, I decided to make one a third of its size, and Glyph and I worked out the "3-slot system" where you could move to any of 3 vertical slots in the screen in order to dodge things, to replace the laser dodging system. The graphics were beginning to affect the game's design. But we were COO WIT IT.
After we got over the slope of starting a project, we started tossing around simple, gimmicky planet ideas. "Lets make a planet with tons of moons that it shoots at you, or a planet that has no color". This system actually worked quite well. Well, Glyph did all of the programming, so I can't talk on behalf of him. But it was easy to design them once we had simple concepts. This went on for a little while, and we finished a few planets. I was bragging about IS' progress on other IRC channels, and that's when my friend queried me saying something along -err, EXACTLY along the lines of
Session Ident: Gun6
[20:02] Session Ident: Gun6 (EsperNet, LazyWaffle) (wrwerk)
[20:02] <Gun6> Aqua you ___
01[20:02] <LazyWaffle> what
[20:02] <Gun6> :U
01[20:02] <LazyWaffle> what do you want
01[20:03] <LazyWaffle> oh
[20:03] <Gun6> you need somebody with maaaddd MSPaint skillz?
01[20:03] <LazyWaffle> mayhap
01[20:04] <LazyWaffle> i'll talk to Glyph about it
01[20:04] <LazyWaffle> alright, come awn down to #pentaclam
WARNING: Do not actually go to #pentaclam, or risk being crushed and melted.So. My friend, Gun, who was a long-time artist who had much more experience than I, had joined the team. He adapted partially to the MS Painty style, but refused to give up the line tool for the brush. This led to the graphical clashing you might notice. I used the sloppy, cartoony paint brush while Gun used the clean, organized line tool. It was only expected, as he never used this style.
Twas no matter, however. He was a huge help when it came to design, and he also made more (and better) graphics in less time, allowing faster development. As time passed, we realized it couldn't simply be tons of bosses. We had to think of something in between the bosses. But what?
The answer was, for some reason, platforming missions. There was no argument, so we just went with it. We kind of ignored it for a while, and got back to making planets.
Time flowed, and the project evolved into something too big for a compo deadline to get in the way of. We ended up with 9 funtastic planets, each with their own gimmicks. We released a small beta to a couple people (Alec and Quenten), and they gave some quite helpful feedback. No bugs were found, however, so we moved on to the platforming.
We had nothing to go on except for an old platforming engine Glyph made a while ago and the fact that it would involve missions. This would be a challenge.
Gun made tilesets at the pace of a turtle, and when he finally finished, I made some rather crappy levels. And then Glyph made some levels. And then creative differences came in.
Glyph wanted something more serious, and complex for the interior. I wanted something lighthearted and not-to-be-taken-seriously. After several fights that may or may not have involved the death of innocent kittens, we finally settled on something in between. The missions would still be lighthearted and not serious, but they would still be somewhat complex. We came up with some ideas for missions. And now we're making them.
And that's how Glyph got mauled by a bear.
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