Geek Life

I've been working on a simple arena shooter called GEEK LIFE - it's a huge mash-up of classic game enemies, weapons, power-ups and characters. You will fight waves of enemies and obstacles like zombies, slimes (DragonQuest), spinning turtle shells (Mario), falling tetrominos(Tetris), mutant babies (Dead Space), Katamari balls, space invaders and much more!

You'll have to fight with whatever you can get - spread gun (Contra), a lightsaber, a giant sword (RPGs) or the classic zombie-blasting shotgun! Or maybe you'd prefer shooting hadokens or pissed-off birds? Allies will help you win (grenade-throwing worms, miniature wingmen starships) and so should power-ups (leaf shield(MegaMan), speed boost skates (Bomberman), mushrooms)...

I'm building Geek Life in Game Maker. Keep in mind that I'm working on it as a brainless side-project (a couple hours every week on my so-called "GM Sunday Nights") so it could be a while before you see the full game! Please submit comments and ideas, it'll help my motivation! I also want to chronicle the game's evolution in a proper devlog with screenshots, so here it is! Remember that the art is mostly placeholder for the moment!

(And yeah, I'm dropping Pirate Heroes, Gem Dungeon and Anything Beats Everything (programmer problems) for now! Sorry! )

Version History

0.12
Category card is displayed in the interface!
"Catcard" changes every wave!
Posted devlog on TIGSource Forums! Waaagh!

0.11
XP and Life bars change color depending on %
Level number is displayed up top, with padding, up to 999

0.10
New interface!
Hero looks at the cursor, left,right,up and down! Looks way better than before. It's flexible, so I can add sub directions too.
Hero attracts orbs from a certain distance
Hero collects XP with blue orbs, added to the xp bar

0.9
Switched to GameMaker 8.1
Hero looks up if mouse is higher than hero, down if lower - I don't like it so far... need a better logic...)
Mobs drop Life orbs at random, at random positions around death
Hero collects orbs and gains health back
XP does nothing yet, need new interface

0.8
Added Life and XP orbs, but they do nothing yet
Tried something with gun direction, didn't work

0.7
Hero looks up when moving up (not very logical when shooting downwards)

0.6
Big update: random selection of a category for each wave!
The list of categories will be expanded during the game (unlocks)
Each category has a different spawn function!
^_^

0.5
Expanded room, view follows hero with padding
New character and enemy sprites, animated slime
List of enemy categories behind the scenes

0.4
Buggy pile of crap

0.3
Death animation for enemies
Shotgun bullet spread

0.2
Slower movement, bigger hero
Health bar!

0.1
Started from a top down shooter engine prototype I have made during GDC 2011
Player movement
Player shoots bullets towards cursor
Bullets hurt and destroy enemies
Homing enemies (a little wonky)
Room boundaries
Bumping Walls
Spawner selects a spawn point at random amongst all spawn points
Timeline decides when to spawn enemies, not infinite