New update, I have been working hard!! Here is a small update. I’ve been thinking a lot about the conversation I had above and I might significantly cut down the planet platform part or make it so we only enter one planet for the demo. But here it is,
You will be able to collect the small asteroid parts and deliver them to a recycling center for space cash! Then with that you can upgrade your ship and weapons and so on. I really like the story I have for this game, it’s really cool and sci-fi but I need to focus on as much fun as I can!
If anyone likes to do 1-bit pixel art and wants to collaborate let me know
So upon further exploration I think I may have doing a really fun multiplayer game with my game lol I am going to switch gears a bit and see if I can make this simpler and focused game. It’s a simple game loop and I feel could be a lot of fun! More updates soon.
If anyone wants to help me with Pixel art and animations please DM me, we could talk about revenue share and this idea further.
I love the art style! you really got something going on there !
My only feedback to improve the art (to my personal taste!) is to try working with a fixed pixel resolution across the screen. In many “pixel art” games, some objects have different pixel size, or the UI is in a different resolutions, or rotations rotate the pixels. I personally prefer when the art lives on an actual pixel grid (e.g. 640 x 480).
Very curious to see what is your multiplayer version of the game. Looking forward to seeing more!
Oh man, the Game is so different now. It has basically zero story now but a much higher potential for fun!! Take a look, I can have up to 6 local multiplayers.
My only issue is, does everybody have six controllers laying around in their house for their PC? Or, I should probably release this for PlayStation and the Switch. I hope that’s easy to do with Godot.
Either way thank you for the encouraging words!! Yesterday my luck changed and I had a very good pixel artist approach me and asked to join me in making the game.
I have been thinking a lot about making the Game 3D (while keeping it all the same, like a 2D top down) That would give me a lot more room to make this look cooler, lighting and atmosphere in a 1-bit style could be very sweet!
I am also thinking to pause my John Space project to make a simpler local multiplayer game, actually. John Space’s graphic style is too rich for making satisfying progress every week as a solo gamedev.
There is definitely an audience for party games (2-8 players), although they would most often be played a 2, then 3, then 4 players, etc. If I go for my local mutiplayer project, I am planning a 2 player coop mode and a versus (2-4 players), in the same vibe at TowerFall Ascension.
In terms of publishing on Playstation, I’ve heard that this is the hardest, with any engine.
Wow! Yeah, it hit me after talking to people here and just being overwhelmed with so much to do. I remember when I first started making this game flying the spaceship and pushing around the asteroids felt fun! lol I came back to that idea and decided to make a game around it. It’s much simpler and something I’m confident I can actually finish!
I’d love to work with you someday on a project man!
It has captured my attention and wont let go lol I love it. I started playing it a few days ago. I guess there is an audience for very heavy story based games and puzzles. It’s a really good story. I’m so heavy into storytelling I think I will try something like this next!
Using the idea for skip tracer and the big story I had behind it.
Okay, so I was able to finish the prototype for this game ‘Outer Trace’ is what I called it. And it’s cool, but I think in order for it to really be successful I would need to make a full multiplayer game online. That’s the only way in my mind I can see it actually working out, I can’t imagine people getting together by the group of six or more and everybody having a controller next to their one PC and it just doesn’t feel possible.
So I’m going to try to do that and get it up on itch.io and see if I can get something going where it’s multiplayer online. And the meantime I have a different game that I’ve started working on inspired by the Pine game in the heavy storyline. I love telling stories and so I think this is going to be a lot of fun for me.
I know it’s very early in this game for you but I just thought I would mention that if you are scrolling out the text in a speech bubble, it is worth taking the time to add looking ahead so if a word does not fit it starts on the next line, rather than starting to type out and jumping. It makes it so much more pleasant to read.
Incidentally, for an early prototype, it is already looking really interesting! I hope it goes well. Will it be like a choose your own adventure? Or a more linear type of thing. Choose your own with multiple endings has great replay-ability, but is a nightmare to control. I tried it once and it ended in disaster so had to revert back to a linear story.
Thanks Paul, yeah that’s been on my mind for a while. I hate how the text does that. I just haven’t taken the time look into a better solution.
About the choose your own adventure I’m not sure. I finally got my display_player to a place that feel much more robust. I have internal rules and game state with commands I can add directly to the Json file and it executed during the game.
I will try to have a choose your own adventure that still leads to the same result. I need to further develop the story in order to do that though.
Okay, it’s been a long long time!! Here is a bit of what I’ve been doing.
I kind of switched to a very simple art style and that allowed me to keep going in my progress which was very heavy on the coding and creating a dialogue system and I had a JSON file that can send commands at the beginning of a dialogue and at the end and these commands can trigger different events in the game. There was just a lot of stuff that I needed to do and make sure it all worked and now that that’s done I really miss the other art style that I was using.
I had this wonderful opportunity to send my game to ‘Intellikat’ who is the creator of the game Pine that really inspired me to go down this whole journey, so I’m so grateful for his incredible feedback and really helping me get re-centered in the right direction. Especially with composition and cinematography.
So here’s what I have this is a little tiny intro of the game so far:
I like this art style. Detailed despite being black and white.
I would have liked to see when he puts on a jump suit, his graphic actually changing.
Conventionally, designers like to highlight interact-able level elements but in this case it might suit better to leave it as it is; sort of approach it and see if you can do anything with it.
The player travelling in front of one light source and behind the other is curious. I don’t understand that.
Intro length is just about too long for me but not irritating.
Endless possibilities with this story. Looking forward to seeing more.
Thanks, I agree about the jumpsuit I just haven’t finished the animation for that yet. I also made both lights behave the same, it does look weird otherwise. Some good new I have a very good composer that’s going to work with me on the game. I’m excited, I’ll show more once I have it ready. Re-Drawing a lot!
Okay, I’m at a more stable place now and I curious if anyone here would mind or be interested in testing out the gameplay…? Please hit me up if you do here or DM.
I just realized I can embed the game online in Itch.io so here it is… it’s very early and rough but it’s here! About 15 ish -20 mins of game play if you read everything lol idk. Let me know your thoughts. Btw it’s only about a quarter of the game right now.
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