Posted December 13, 2024 by Kichex
#release #thoughts
Hi there everyone, I'm proud to announce my first solo-ish project Speed Squared! It's a simple but tough platformer about being fast and precise through 40 levels (with more incoming later). Play level by level and check your scores or go nonstop mode so nothing interrupts your jam!
It has been an interesting journey for me for the two months I've been working on this.
My day job as a game designer absorbs most of my creative energy so I rarely take the time to work on personal projects and always end up feeling really bad about it. This year there has been some changes in my life that pushed me to do something about it.
Back in October I came back to this profile and played some of the games I've published here (also a bunch of the delisted ones too) and from there I took a deeper look into the games I've made throughout the years. One of them was Cube Wars, done using game maker 8.1 (I may publish this here someday?).
At the time I was obsessed with Minecraft and because squares are the most simple shape you can make in 2D I went HARD on the aesthetic. Definitely needed some lessons about not melting other people's retinas with the same shade of red though.
I remember a hunger for learning, for creating, for seeing my little guy jump and shoot and do the things I want it to do but now I noticed that I lost some of that.
In the 13 years between cube wars and today I've turned game dev into my carreer, came from being a programmer to a game desiger but I've always felt like I needed to make something by myself for myself and that was eating me inside.
Most of the games you'll find in my profile are old unity games I've made for jams in very short time and Speed Square is the first one I've been able to take the time to build, playtest and polish for a bit longer but I couldn't have been able to do it without looking back at what I've done before and recognize I CAN make cool stuff by myself.
Coming back to Game Maker Studio was like coming back home from a long long week of work, I felt welcome and in the mood of creating, that's how I started on Speed Squared.
It took me mostly 2 months to take the game from zero to this point working on it during the night and the weekends without any crunch or losing any sleep and while delivering a tough milestone at work.
I made all the game's code, sounds and graphics and had some help from my friend Aelspecto who made a banger of song for the background music of the game.
By the time this is published you'll be able to play Speed Square, I hope you had as much fun as I had making it and rate and share if you do, that helps a lot!