A devlog? Why not!

So I'm working on Crossing the Eastern Desert to the Lands of Mnar... damn, I picked a monster of name. I should just call it CEDLoM for now.

Anyway, it's a simple bullet hell shooter, with Mad Max-y cars and bikes driving around a desert and shooting at each other. Not very plot-heavy, I should say. I'm doing it with Gamemaker: Studio, which seems to be quite easy engine to learn after fighting with UE4 and Unity for few years. Sprites are made with Pyxel Edit, because it's awesome.

• Scrolling background (although I don't how it looks and feels). Might do something simpler.
• Player that moves, shoots, explodes on contact and leaves a dust trail.
• Randomly placed boulders that scroll down the screen. Should be destroyed after leaving the screen. Bullets too.
• An enemy bike that shoots at the player, explodes on contact and after getting shot. Doesn't move or shoot by itself yet.

I should make boulders look more random. That should be easy with just more sprites and changing the orientation.

• Create them outside the room, either randomly or at certain spawn points.
• Enemy enters the room, either on a pattern or randomly.
• Starts shooting at the player and moving around. Patterns?
• After a while, if not destroyed, moves away and gets destroyed outside.

That's a lot to do. I should get on it.

Cheers mates, have a good one. @whiskeycabinet

I managed to make a crude AI system for the Enemy Bike.

That'll do for tonight.

Even though it's very minimal right now, it still feel very grundgy Mad-Max-y, those soot trails/tire tracks add a lot!

i agree with andy! i really like the art assets you have so far and the dust trails definitely add a lot even without a scrolling background!

Thanks for the feedback! The art assets shouldn't be that high on my to-do list, but I still end up spending a lot of time pushing sprites. Luckily I've managed to work on the gameplay too.

I added multiple spawning enemies, variations on the boulders, power ups and a simple GUI element. I did learn something too; irandom_range and random_range are slightly different functions, and irandom_range(-1,1) also includes the value 0. Invisible boulders were a bit too hardcore obstacles.

It actually starts to feel like a game. I guess it's already more complex than Asteroids...

I'm really liking GameMaker. So far, if I have and idea, I've managed to test it and get it working in under an hour. With Unreal it would take days (mostly because of bad and/or obsolete documentation).

Next, respawing and lives. More enemies. More guns. A shield? Maybe. Cheers mates, have a good one.

i love how your ui is coming along!! i agree the screenshake would definitely juice this a bit

Thanks for the feedback, folks!

Yesterday, as I was preparing lunch, I had an idea: "I should make a nuke." So I made a nuke.

(it's powerful enought to crash the game :s)

Other things I've added:

• Shield
• Player blinking (without the collider) after respawning. No extra deaths!
• Enemies with more than 1 hitpoint blink after getting hit.
• Game Over screen.
• Some adjustments to the GUI. I tested the game in fullscreen and everything was not awesome, so that had to be fixed. Now it should scale properly.
• Last enemy (before the boss).

Making that thing move was more difficult than I expected. Now it seems too easy for an enemy. Maybe it should shoot even more bullets (goodbye fps).

That's for this week, seven days down.

I still have to make the boss fight, sounds, maybe a soundtrack, special effects and some tweaking. Oh, and the cheat code, for debugging of course.w

Today I started working on the boss.

I kinda like the look on it. That and the trike look a lot like the units from the good old Dune 2. I just couldn't get the turret working as I wanted, have to do that tomorrow. Saturday evening just isn't the best time to work on the code.

I tweaked the item spawning; now the nuke has a lot smaller chance to drop. Also fixed the trucks, their pattern was pretty predictable.

And after the boss fight, I think that the game play is done.

Now it's just some fine tuning, sounds and main menu.

I think the game is ready. There might come some things to work on (like I managed to trigger the boss while the player was dead, which crashed the game), but that's QA departments job :P

I also managed to bug out the particle system, which turned out to increase the frame rate a lot. So I dropped the smoke trail from the bullets and left the tire trails. Those bullets looked like tadpoles anyway.

Now there's a screen shake for collisions, bullet hits and shooting. It was a lot easier to do than I thought (view_angle ftw). I also grabbed a simple chiptune from http://opengameart.org (CG Ram by Chasersgaming) and have to admit, it really fits the game and makes it so much better. Inspired by that I started working on some sound effects and bullet fragments to indicate a hit, and the The Crossing starts to come out pretty well.

It is done.

https://whiskeycabinet.itch.io/crossing-the-easter...

Crossing the Eastern Desert includes:

• 3 enemies + boss
• 2 weapons, 2 powerups
• Music by chasersgaming at opengameart.org
• Bleeps & bloops made at bfxr.net
• Simple pixel art made with Pyxel Edit
• Game made with GameMaker: Studio
• Cheat code (for debugging reasons). If you have to ask, it's the full Smashing Pumpkins one. You know.

It was a blast. My first gamejam, my first game made with GM. I learned a lot (and surprised myself how much I've already learned). I know there's a ton of stuff I could have made better (like using scripts, states, arrays, that kind of stuff), but it works.

awesome work!! i'm definitely checking this out after the jam--i've also featured this dev log in our highlights!