In December I did something very unique, for me at least.. I had a full month of no game development at all. Mostly due to the home renovation that took about 8-9 months finally being wrapped up and a lot of cleaning and sorting out junk needed attention.
But it’s January, it’s 2014, and it’s time to get back on the horse and create some art!
I dug through the various prototypes I started on, Groundskeeper2, a space version of Heroes of Loot, some sketchy Gunslugs2 idea’s and a bunch of other things. The best way to get back into it all was hit the ground running, so hopefully one of these prototypes was worth saving and completing..
And we have a winner! Groundskeeper 2 was a solid prototype with a clear direction: shoot stuff! I’ve been building it on the Gunslugs code base, so it does have a few things in common, and I was a bit worried that it would be too much gunslugs. However I decided to ignore that fact and just create a great action game and see how much it has in common in the end. Let’s face it, it wouldn’t be the worst thing to be a bit Gunslugs-like, would it?
So my first week of being “Back on the job” I dug into this prototype, changed graphics, changed some more graphics, changed the same graphics again, adding bits and bobs all over the place, fixing bugs that I didn’t care about during prototyping phase, and scribbling down bigger ideas to make it a worthy first Orangepixel game of 2014.
I plan to add a bunch of levels, some animation stuff, and just generally put in crazy ideas!
I’ll try to have some moving media to look at soon, as I’m also trying to figure out a better name for this than “groundskeeper”. The current action is really pretty fun to play, but it’s a very short game and I want to see if I can come up with an interesting replay-ability mechanic. Obviously adding more worlds will also do the job, and I plan on doing just that in the next few weeks.
And for those hoping to see the sci-fi spin off to Heroes of Loot.. don’t worry! That prototype is also still a contender, still have some great ideas going for that one, and I kinda love sci-fi more than I love dungeon’s ;)
