storytime!
(note: submission is a bit off, it was more around 10.5 hours before time)

STRIKER: COOLEST DUDE is a highlight reel of sorts for my first ideas and documentation for making action games. Excluding a certain big project that I still want to do and my first Javascript-based interactive fiction, STRIKER is a goofy and exaggerated version of my first action title, CARNAGE REPORT.

Following the escapades of incredibly cool OC's in the city of Atomos, the ANGLE/ANGEL squad (the two got confused a lot, and sometimes both were correct) wages an expensive and high-tech war against THUGCORP-- an evil corporation heisting and taking territory in broad daylight, led by a boardroom of sketchy figures that some doubt are even real.

I originally wanted to make a multiplayer FPS where you have an open city to explore. One player would be the Commander and tell players where to go, and all the other players got HUD pop-ups telling them what to do based on that. Meanwhile, the other team would play as ThugCorp, and they could strike at any time anywhere. Using wallrunning, grapple hooks, jetpacks, and all sorts of other gadgets, the ANGEL squad needed to be anywhere at any time to stop them from getting away with their ill-gotten gains.

I don't know about you, but this synopsis sounds like it might have been a little prone to feature creep. It proved to be a little ambitious for a child with no programming experience, no game design experience, and no useful software or tools to rely on.

So, in short, this game and world never existed outside of my head. I talked big about some of the gameplay mechanics and how cool this was going to be to play... but I didn't make the game, and anyone I told forgot. CR faded into nothingness just like that. Except...

When I was in my Freshman year of college, a conversation with some friends right around the time that PUBG Mobile was getting big piqued my interest. If I wanted to make a multiplayer game for mobile, and one that people would actually enjoy, how would I do it? Pretty soon, Carnage Report had come back up in my head, and I got to conceptual work. With a renewed effort, I gave the game an actual reasonable scope and premise. I started to figure out what I wanted the game to look like, created some new characters that capitalized on the goofy aspect of them, and essentially drafted a new asymmetrical multiplayer idea with some proof of concept in art and music. Unfortunately, I was still very much an amateur at the time, and this effort didn't go very far either. However, it did lead me to create a ton of electronic music and try my hand at digital art again, just a small step along the way to where I am today. In fact, one of the character sprites is my second full body sketch from this project! You'll also hear bits of salvaged music here and there that date back to Carnage's second wind.

There are certainly game/project ideas from that time that stuck with me a lot more, but Carnage Report always appealed to me as an interesting what-could-have been simply because I enjoyed the premise and tone for just how absurd it could get. So... here we are today.

STRIKER: COOLEST DUDE is a short 2D side-scrolling action game developed over the course of half a week as a tribute to all of these good and not-so-good memories of a child's underdeveloped game ideas.

While this new game opted for original characters and doesn't feature any of the real cringey-yet-lovable OC's like Mark Smann or Operator Kelli, it still conveys that dumb world in all its glory. I even managed to fit a Ro-Bro into the plot!

The artstyle is a mix of basic 3D gamejam art, crude hand-drawn stick figure sprites comparable to much of my early "comics" (from before the age of 9) that are thankfully no longer around, and the backdrops replicate the awful Google Drawings files that I once used [ironically, I hope] to sketch cool setpiece-esque ideas. Commented with helpful text like "Me ->" or "LVL UP", I feel ashamed that these didn't hit the furnace half a decade ago... but alas, here we are. It haunts me, and now it haunts you too.

This game certainly has its rough edges as a result of its short development time, and you'll probably be underwhelmed by the character art in gameplay... all fair criticisms. That said, I hope you enjoy what I was able to cobble together with spaghetti, a spare four days, and childhood dreams!