Hello, everyone!

Did you know that you can create posts that aren't connected to a project now? It's been a while since I've really made anything worth uploading to the site (and to be honest, I still haven't), but I felt like some of my creations that have gone unfinished or abandoned might be interesting to talk about, and of course, I want to let everyone know that I am still here!

Up first is a weird little project, Super Dark Space, that was intended to combine dungeon-crawling adventure and inventory management with top-down shooting combat for enemy encounters. Yeah, I know, another roguelike when we're already oversaturated with the genre, right? This was intended to be both an experiment with bigger color palettes and a sequel-of-sorts to Dark Space, a standard side-scrolling shooter which was the first game I uploaded here on itch.io and is still seeing the most attention out of all of my games. Although I'm glad that people still enjoy that game, it doesn't really hold up to my current standards (the coding is fairly sloppy, and I know there's at least one really obscure game-crashing glitch that I couldn't care less about finding and fixing), but I've always had a passive interest in making a new game set in the same universe to try and do things better.

I had a lot of ideas planned out for Super Dark Space, with the primary gimmick being about obtaining special powers from all the enemies in the game that you can mix and match on your character as you level up and acquire more "points" to equip them, but I ended up discovering that I kind of despise programming procedurally-generated levels. It just doesn't give me the same sense of satisfaction as hand-crafting levels, which is why I reckon I've been more into making puzzle and platformer games in the past few years. So yeah, Super Dark Space is shelved at the moment, but I'm still interested in some of its concepts, so who knows, it might end up being reborn as something else someday.

This little curio is something I recently started putting together after a random inspiration to try programming a more advanced enemy AI snuck into my mind. It's intended to be a competitive match-three type of puzzle game where you'll eventually be able to compete against a variety of opponents with their own little quirks and playstyle differences. If this one does end up seeing the light of day, I intend for this to be another one of my "short" games, like Crossbow Cavern or Night Visitors 2, mainly created to test out some concepts I have in mind. However, I would love to take the chance to revisit and flesh out some of my characters and worlds a little more in a brief story mode, even if it all ends up being non-canon.

Although I've hardly accomplished much of anything that I can visually show you, I've been surprised with how technical the creation of a game in this genre has been already. While not in use at the moment, the first big challenge I had to handle for the future was getting a system set up that will allow for both players to always receive the same randomized pieces in the same order; I ended up learning quite a bit more about the implementation of random seeds in GameMaker Studio after doing some research and trying a few experiments. On the horizon, I'll have to figure out how I intend to go about programming combos, chains, attacks, special powers, and of course, an AI opponent who isn't a complete pushover.

Well, thank you for reading through my dumb little status update! It's certainly different to write something like this as opposed to the usual, objective update logs I write for my released projects, but it's been fun to try and organize my thoughts about some of the things that I normally don't talk about in a public format. If you'd be interested in more posts and devlogs of this variety, aside from the usual update logs I do for my released games already, then feel free to say something down in the comments!