2021 was a bad year for me with regards to keeping my blog updated. So for this year I have decided to create monthly updates regarding the status of my projects. So check out what I have been doing in the first month of 2022.
So in 2021, I had around 4 different game ideas that I liked. 2 of these ideas are still in the research/pre-production phase, so I am not going to talk about them. The first project I am going to talk about is the long way (which is a working title). the long way is an extremely challenging physics-based action game set in a post-apocalyptic world. The player controls a character that is trying to reach the Last Settlement. But to get there, the player has to scavenge food and tools in abandoned buildings to travel across the wasteland.
This game has got quite a lot of potential in my opinion, but it also has got quite a lot of work to get it completed.
One thing that took me a long time to fix (decide on) was the aiming system. The aiming system works by a dot on the screen which is controlled by the mouse or a gamepad. Simple right, but now I had to take into consideration different height levels. I easily made the character look in the direction of the aim dot, but making the weapon aim in the right height of the aim was a problem. This was because there was an offset of the aim dot to make sure the character did not aim at the ground at that point, which no player will want to do. So that worked fine, but then I had to make the aim not be offset when aiming at a wall because that would lead to a bad user experience. And on top of that, I also had to consider if there was anything in the way between the player and the aim dot and make sure to calculate everything correctly. That is a lot, so you must be wondering how I fixed all this. Well, it was quite simple… I removed different level heights and aiming at walls from the game. Maybe this will lead to blander levels, but maybe it will allow me to focus on better set scenarios. Either way, I will see how it works out in the next month.
The other game I am working on is called TACTICAL BANDITS. You might remember Tactical Bandits 2, well you can consider this the prequel… sort of. TACTICAL BANDIT is a one-hit kill action game where the player can focus and slow down time to complete the objectives on every level.
As you can see, the game is already looking quite good. This project also has quite a lot of work to get it completed, but it is a smaller project than the long way.
Aiming was much more simple in TACTICAL BANDITS than in the long way, mainly because I used the fixed version of the long way in TACTICAL BANDITS.
For now, I am going to continue working on both projects and decide by the end of February in what to do next.