It probably wouldn't be that difficult to implements some sort of height mapping on the floors - the most tedious part would probably either be working out the math to keep the player at the right z value at varying positions between vertices or figuring out the best way to generate/layout the triangles in the vertex buffer to make it look nice. I might try making a racing game or something with hills and banked corners for a future project while working my way up to something more elaborate.

The reflections are mostly just a flipped copy of everything rendered underneath the floor. The most complicated parts of that are keeping the vertex buffers optimized while also controlling the vertex submit order very carefully to make sure that everything that needs to look like a reflection is submitted before the floor and everything else after or the illusion breaks in various ways.

Thanks for playing and thanks for the interesting questions!

I think I set the level generation system to generate 5 levels, so you were probably pretty close to the win screen!

Thanks for playing!

Thank you! Getting the neon effect to look right took a bunch of trial and error to get the textures and the glow shader to work well together. The colors used in the textures turned out to be really important - I had to use darker colors than you might expect to give the shader some (color) space to work with.

Since this was made for the game jam, I was targeting somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 to 20 minutes of gameplay because I figured that would be enough time to get a good feel for what this game has going for it, but wouldn't be so much that people wouldn't have time to finish playing through it while they're trying give the other 200-ish jam entries a try.

Thanks for playing and thanks for the nice comment!

Yep, entirely made with GMS2 - no fancy extensions or anything. One of my goals with this project was to make a type of game that people generally don't associate as something you'd make with GameMaker. Early on, I toyed around with the idea of making a racing game, but then I cranked out a simple maze generator to help test out how I was going to handle collisions and navigating the maze felt really good so I shifted focus to an FPS instead.

Thanks for noticing the visual health indicator things on the enemies. I didn't think it felt good to just have the enemies sponge a bunch of damage with no sign of progress, but I didn't want to just have floating health bars or numbers either- so, having a bunch of light bulbs or something floating around the enemies seemed like a nice way to be a little more subtle and on theme about it.

The letters on the walls represent cardinal directions and were originally for testing so that I could make sure my level generation algorithms  were building the vertex buffers and setting the uv map coordinates correctly. As for the wall colors, you have to light up at least 50% of the maze green to activate the exit and when an enemy turns a green set of walls magenta, that does deduct from your active percentage of the maze. I don't think a lot of people have run into this, but if you get an enemy or two to chase you across the maze, they can actually take over big chunks of the maze real quick and make it difficult to get control of that 50% it takes to activate the exit. In a future revision, I'd really like to add something to the GUI that shows how much of the level is under player/enemy/neutral control to make that a little more clear.

Thanks for playing!

Thanks for playing and glad you liked it!

When I saw that the theme was Neon, I immediately knew I had to learn how to write some flavor of glow shader and that I wanted to run said shader on some high res textures to  try and pull off a super clean and (hopefully) convincing neon/florescent light aesthetic. The reflections were born out of a happy accident where I used the wrong sign on a z-axis value while testing something with the system that optimizes the vertex buffers that make up the mazes.

Thanks for playing and I'm glad you enjoyed it!

I did create the raw textures with vector software (Affinity Designer), exported them as PNG files at resolutions varying from 256x256 to 2048x2048, and then imported them int GMS2 as sprites. The low pov has been a common critique - so, behind the scenes over here I've been playing around with adjusting a few values and I think the effect I was going for can be better achieved by raising the eyeline up a few units and lowering the ceiling to about 1/3 the height it's at in the jam submission. 

Thanks for playing, the feedback, and the kind words!

Thanks for playing and I'm glad you liked it!

Yeah, there could definitely stand to be a little more feedback when taking a hit. A little camera shake and color fade could be cool, maybe something to indicate the direction the hit came from would be nice. I'd like to jazz up the impacts from projectiles too. Maybe when a bullet hits a wall it could leave a glowing marks that fades out for a few seconds kind of like a light saber cutting through stuff. Enemies could stand die a little bit more elaborately than the current blip out of existence too. Maybe I'll get ambitious enough to get them exploding into a shower of sparks and broken glass...

Thanks for playing and the feedback!

That's a good point about the need for some flavor of damage indicator. I'll have to think on that.

The cardinal directions on the walls were originally supposed to be just for testing, to make sure all the uv maps were getting set correctly - but then I kind of got used to them being there, so they made it into the high res textures when I was replacing debugging graphics.

Thanks for playing and thanks for the feedback!

Yeah, with the benefit of all the great feedback I've been getting here, I think the enemies would be a lot better if they at least aggro'd on the player when they get shot from a distance like that. I've also since realized that I at least should've set the position that the ambient hvac noise comes from to the position of the exit instead of just the center of the maze. Maybe if I develop the game out more in the future I can add a something that visually points you towards the exit. Perhaps the traditional compass/arrow or perhaps a path lights up on the floor or something could be cool. I originally intended for there to be kind of a karma meter that would've displayed how much of the level was controlled by the player, the enemy, and how much was still neutral - but I ran out of time because I wanted to make sure the HUD scaled consistently across different screen resolutions really well,  so it's all textured primitives that get positioned/scaled relative to the current screen dimensions and took a bit more time to setup than like draw_sprite functions would have.

Thanks for the feedback!

So, I've been playing around with a few values in the project that raise the player perspective a little more off the ground and drops the ceiling down to about a third the height in the jam entry and I think I'm starting to get a lot closer to a happy medium where the maze still feels large without making the player feel like a mouse. Luckily, I set things up so I can test stuff like this by just changing a few variables around - which is totally the result of advanced forward thinking game design techniques and not at all dumb luck.
Thanks for playing and all the kind words!

The ambient audio thing had a lot to do with trying to work around music being an aspect of game development that's particularly outside of my skill set - but yeah, it would have been really cool to speed everything up over a bunch of fast tempo techno music or something. Some of the things wanted to do, but didn't have the time for would've been to have shots leave a glowing mark that kind of fades away as it cools down (kind of like when a light saber cuts something) when they hit the walls/floor/ceiling and I really wanted the enemies to burst into a shower of sparks and broken glass when defeated.

Thanks for playing and taking the time to give some thoughts!

• You're not the first to tell me the camera felt too low. My intention was to make the mazes feel larger, but I guess it didn't really hit the way I intended and ended up making most people feel like they were crawling on the floor or something instead.
• Music is easily my biggest weakness when I solo-dev something. That's why I kind of copped out on music and tried to record ambient looping hvac noise - I just realized while typing this that it probably would've been neat to set the positional values in the audio_play_sound_at functions that to the position of the maze exits.
• I don't know if everyone would like the game defaulting to full screen, but setting the window position to the middle of the screen does sound like a good idea.
• The rectangle around the GUI elements bugs me a lot. For the glow shader to add the glow around everything, the texture needs at least some semi-transparent pixels to do its thing and I could not get GMS and Affinity Designer to cooperate with import sprites/textures with like a semi-transparent gradient around the edges. Any of the elements in the game you saw that do have that around the edges, I had to go in and manually add that in with the sprite editor in GMS - it was a lot of work and by the time I got to the GUI stuff I was just too short on time (I didn't re-use any existing assets for this game, the whole thing was put together from scratch in about 9 days).
• I didn't want the enemies to be able to enter a chase state from across the entire maze or anything - but in retrospect, I probably should have at least had them aggro on you if they take a hit.

Thanks for playing and thanks for the quality feedback!

The level generation system I put together actually already defines a few positions to drop some power ups - but I didn't have time to make the power ups, so for now it just spawns a few extra enemies in those spots instead. Thanks again for trying the game out and for all of the valuable feedback!