Introduction

This post is sort of both my introduction post and the start of the devlog of the game I've been working on and off for almost 2 years now (Although it's mostly off since I'm a college student). I'm not really used to writing and posting blogs but I'll try my best to express my ideas and thoughts clearly. I know that it's a bit late to start a devlog now cause there's already a considerable amount of progress and a whole lot of code but you know what they say: it's better late than never.

So just a short background of me, I'm still a hobbyist when it comes to game development, I sort of tried dabbling with Unity during high school but I never really got into it (mostly due to my focus on education) until the pandemic where a lot of us had free time. I then had this "crazy" idea to create a small game where I try to limit any use of public assets and instead create all from scratch (as I have a background in art and animation). I racked my brain for any ideas and since I'm a big fan of old games from the NES or SNES era like "Megaman" and "Castlevania", plus I love cyberpunk movies like "Blade Runner" and "Robocop" , I decided to make a platformer with a pixel art style set in a cyberpunk world.  

The result is my current project, "Light Speed Gunner", where you play as a gunner hunting infamous mercenaries for bounties.

What I've Made So Far

I've planned this game to be small-scaled since I'm only developing it to dive deeper into game development and I don't really want to make anything grand or ambitious for my first rodeo. So, I aimed to create 4 levels each with their own unique enemies and boss (although I did end up reusing a couple enemies).

So far here are the screens I made (all of which are subject to change):

• The initial version of the 4 levels with background, lighting, and boss


• The title screen (shown in the introduction)
• The game over screen


• The level select screen

What's Left to Do

Now the game is still very far from being done. I naively thought I could finish this in 1-2 years due to its small scale but even the smallest things in game development can take a lot of time. Here's a couple of things that I've still yet to add in my project:

• Sound - I already made and added some sound effects like footsteps and gunshots but the themes for the levels and the menus are still to be composed. I made a couple of attempts in creating a synthwave theme for the level select screen but it just didn't sound like an actual theme so I'm planning to ask a friend to compose probably most, if not all of the music once my project is already almost like an actual game.
• Game Intro - I also plan on having some sort of cinematic intro for the game, something like in those old arcade games like "Streets of Rage" or "Sunset Riders" which plays when nobody is playing the game yet basically what "Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon"  is doing in its intro. It's something that I would like to try and it also sets the tone of the game.
• Points System - I wasn't really planning to add a point system at first since I didn't really think it would matter, from my experience playing those classic games, all that mattered to me was just clearing the levels and I didn't really care about the score but a friend of mine recommended adding points and I realized it sort of makes sense because it gives the game a little bit of replayability. Competitive players can repeat levels to see if they can get a higher score from their previous runs by looking for alternative paths or secrets. Additionally, points are also the norm in the old arcade games which this project is definitely inspired by. 
• Player Progression - as of now, the progression of the player is not really saved. Once you finish a certain level, the game sort of stops there as I still have to find out how to code the player's progress and make sure they can't select a finished level. I also want the game to reset after 3 game overs, similar to the SNES version of "Sunset Riders", to make it more challenging and I feel like unlimited continues makes the "game over" less impactful.
• Game Difficulty - Speaking of challenging, I'm having second thoughts on making the game as "classic" as I can since when I let a couple of my friends test the game they had trouble with its difficulty and I'm still not experienced enough to determine whether it's just my level design or it's them not used to the old style of games where you really need to repeat multiple times and get used to the controls to overcome the difficulty. I ended up slowing the projectiles for the enemies, again a la "Sunset Riders" but I think it just disrupts the flow of the game since unlike "Sunset Riders", the player can dash and easily dodge the projectiles. So yeah, I still have to tweak the game and find the right difficulty.
• Game Settings - this is something I have no idea how to execute so I still need to study this one.
• Improve Sprite arts - There are a couple of sprites and backgrounds that I am not happy with so I plan on improving and giving more life to them.

So yeah, I think that's really all that I can write about for this first post. I hope you find this an interesting read and hopefully I can finish this project some time soon as I'm quite passionate about it and I really enjoyed the process so far no matter how arduous it is.