Good day to you all.  Like everyone else I'm trapped in my house and I need something to do, so I've started yet another project. This time with the simple goal of just completing something from start to finish for once.

I'll be creating a roguelike arcade shooter that takes the gameplay of Space Invaders and adds a fast pace element like you see in games like Super Hexagon.  The goal will be to last as long as possible as you shoot your way through waves of assorted enemy ships that get increasingly more difficult as you progress. To help you'll be able to pick up power ups that will either increase a random stat (fire rate or movement speed for example) or give you a one off special weapon. 

I'll be creating the game using Game Maker Studio 2 and to help I'll use some code I've got from one of my past project, Pixel Raiders. The art style will follow similar vain to Space Invaders and Asteroids so pretty simple. This should all help save time but also help me get back up to speed with Game Maker since it's been a wee while. 

Very early days yet but here's a quick screen grab of the player ship and the initial room for testing all the things in.  

Got the very basic gameplay mechanics of a Space Invaders type game up and running fairly quickly. Only needed to do minor changes to my old Pixel Raiders code as I had made the collision between the game boundaries needlessly complicated. 

Next up I'll look at getting some more enemies, explosions and maybe a scoring system in place. I'm hoping by the end of tonight I'll have all the basic elements in and working, so I can spend tomorrow working on the roguelike part of the gameplay and super weapons.

Looks like a good start!

Thanks @40wattstudio! 

Ran out of steam this evening and drink but still managed to get a few things done. 

The question marks in the screen above are the raider type enemies. They've got a question marks associate with them in editor as there sprite is assigned randomly at the start of the game. 

I also managed to get a few new enemy types in to help spice things up a wee bit. First off is the classic UFO enemy type that flies across the top of the screen shooting down at the player. The second is a little wee bouncy shite called the Bouncer. This enemy is designed to keep the player on their toes as it can come from any angle and a hit from this thing is instant death. 

Tomorrow I'm going to focus on the scoring system and the HUD. I'm going to leave out explosions for the time being as I'm not sure how to do them yet without making the game look all muddled. I'll probably leave them last when I'm polishing up the gameplay. Instead, I'll focus on the roguelike elements next as well.

Today I managed to get a very basic scoring, lives and bullets system in place with them all showing up on the GUI layer in the correct position. I've also got the GUI to scale correctly and will probably look at making a higher res version later down the line to improve accessibility. I also want to change the font but need to find an appropriate one that fits the style for both a low res and high res. 

Next up I'll look at getting a version 0.1 update out for people interested to play and leave feedback. This version won't include much but I'll have at least 4 levels with different enemies, game start and game over.   The brunt of the work will be done on the games Itch.io page to make sure it's presentable as well as supporting assets.