Greetings fellow GameJoltys! My name’s gamemaster468. And my big magnum opus goal at the current moment, is to make a 3D platformer game, in the vane of the PS2 era of platformers, like Jak & Daxter, Sly Cooper, and Ratchet & Clank. Basically a more story driven, mission based kinda platformer game.

This is a game that I’ve been developing ideas for, for quite some time now. Heck, I’d say I’m nearing the two year mark at this point. :P In the summer of 2015, I was fortunate enough to find myself into a group of very talented people, to work on a Toontown Fan Game, as one of the game’s animators, and co-story writter. Sadly though, that project flew south, due to poor management, but we all still wanted to try and work on something. So, I suggested my 3D platformer idea, and the majority of people seemed to be on board with it!

So, we got busy, and began working on a prototype build for the game. For the first few months, development went pretty smoothly! We got ourselves a character model for the main character pretty early on, which I IMMEDIATELY dove in, and made a bunch of animations for. I wrote a script for the game’s story, up until the end of the first world. (Including gameplay, and level descriptions.) We got some concept drawings goin’ for some of the game’s other characters, and even got a good chunk of the basic gameplay mechanics coded in. Things were on the up and up for awhile!

Unfortunately though, that didn’t last. Team members slowly began to fade from the project, whether it’d be from lack of motivation, or just not having enough time to work on it. You know, normal “trying to make a game without a budget” kinda stuff. The development began to move at a snails pace, to the point where several WEEKS would go by, without any progress being made. I tried my hardest to keep the project going, by searching for new members to take their place, but that didn’t turn out so well, to put it lightly…

There would still be short bursts of progress here and there. We managed to get a second character model made for one of the game’s enemies, and I’d say we managed to get about, two thirds of the basic mechanics programmed into the game. But alas, we still didn’t quite reach the milestone that we had planned.

This leads us to the present day. After many failed attempts to try and get the project back on track, I eventually decided to take a break from the project for a little while. After all, there really wasn’t much I could do to develop the game further, as I know pretty much nothing about programming. I do plan on looking into some visual scripting things, like PlayMaker, and see if maybe I can push things along then, but I figured some time away from the project would probably do some good. Give me time to reconsider the game plan for this project.

Now with all that said, I think I may wanna give this thing another shot pretty soon. I might hold off a bit longer, as I have some other things I’m caught up with right now. But when I DO bring this project back, I thought it might be cool to post some blog posts on here about the progress that’s been made thus far. In terms of actual content, the game doesn’t have much. Just a test area, and an early version of the game’s tutorial level that I’m laying out, but I think I have enough things about the game’s development I can talk about, that I can dedicate quite a few blog posts about. Things like the character models, my plans for the game’s story, ect. I think that might be a good way to maybe spark some interest, and see if I can get some new peeps on board to help out with this project. :)

So keep your eyes peeled! When I release the next DevLog, that’ll signal the official return of my 3D platformer project! I hope you guys will be looking forward to it, cause I really do want to make this game a reality. Even if it takes years to do. :P With that said, I hope you enjoyed this little prologue to my Development Log series of posts, for my 3D platformer game, “Sam the Squirrel.” I hope to bring you guys more of these, in the near future. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you guys next time! See you later everyone!

-gamemaster468

PS: If you’re curious, here’s a short video of what the prototype looks like so far: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wkjgx1dqi_E

It’s a tad bit outdated. Sam is able to perform a half implemented ledge grab ability now. Other than that, that’s pretty much what it looks like so far. :P