Making this game has a been a rewarding experience. Sometimes I can’t believe that it was meant to have been a testing project.

I’m not sure if you have noticed this in the videos/gifs of demos so far. But this game has no sprite swap animations (except of just one sprite/object). Everything that moves or has “life” is a result of messing around with scale, rotation, position and transparency.

As you can imagine, half the work in developing a typical game is doing the artwork and animation. I was working on a version of this game that had more the regular type of sprite swap animations when I realized that I was taking way too much time planning the sprite animations.

And as I began working on a few of the sprites, I began spending way too much time focusing on doing them right.

This distracted me from working on the game’s functionality and mechanics. After much frustration. I stopped working on the game entirely and created a clone of the project. This clone would be my testing playground and probably even be a tutorial. But the main goal was to have a project to try out ideas. Later, I would copy them into the original project.

It wasn’t necessary, but I decided to do it anyway.

In the test project, I used simple colors and sprites to ensure the graphics side didn’t take too much of my time.

But the more I designed these “simple” sprites, the more I began to think about a graphic style. Especially because I had decided to use those neon colors that photoshop has on its default color pallette panel.

I immediately felt a Tron-like vibe coming along and before you know it… I decided to turn the test project into a prequel to the original game. It was going to be it’s on standalone game.

Almost immediately, I began developing a backstory/plot for the game just to give context which would help me flesh it out. I then knew what the enemies, bosses and levels would look like. I had an idea of what the game would be about.

Almost a year and a half later, here we are. Working on a project that was initially supposed to help me learn more about making games in GM Studio, but ended up being a game I’m most proud of so far.

I have applied math in this game that would have made my math teachers proud. I have used shaders. Shaders! Can you believe it? I still consider the language used to code shaders very close to what the Ancient Egyptians carved on stone walls.

I’m kidding.

But yeah… shaders.

Anyway, this is exciting for me. This game getting closer and closer to the finish line. I thought I would have lost enthusiasm by now, but I haven’t. I should re-watch Tron.