Well, after all this time playing indie games, I decided to try to develop a very simple game using Game Maker, having no background in computers at all, just a great passion for all this stuff (chiptunes, low res pixel art, blabla) . After a night of reading tutorials I came up with this concept, which I´m trying to expand into a complete game, small and simple and in a single screen, and done with a 10% of knowledge of what Game Maker is capable of (and no coding, just drag and drop, 99%.9%), I just wanted to do something quick I could play. So if you are gonna say "this sucks. you suck. forget game design forever", try to be gentle =)
Here´s the general idea.
You are the little blue astronaut in the middle. Your goal is to capture the colored squids (which actually are animated to change color in an epileptic fashion), while avoiding the red squids, and the bullets from the bigger squids, which fire everytime you catch a colored squid.
Catching colored squids and avoiding red squids gives you score. Touching red squids and bullets kill you.
The only controls are left and right to move.
This is the title screen I doodled
Tools Used:
Game Maker 8 for design and "programming" (drag and drop only)
Photoshop and Game Maker for Pixel Art and animation
Ableton Live as audio sequencer, using Rebirth for programming drums and 8 bit plugins to generate synths
Things I'd like to do:
Add powerups or a gun of some kind.
More enemies
Actually use the scoring system for something, probably a highscore list, or using score as a way to go trough levels, enemies just popup at random over time and execute an action.
Design 4 levels, which will feature different background image, different background music and different enemies.
a boss in the end.
life bar with 3 bars, three lifes, no continues
Cut scenes telling a simple story about an astronaut hunting rare squids and fighting for survival.
Tell me what you think!
here's a playable demo:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=BLZ26XJK
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