One of the things that I find myself doing a lot is reading development blogs for other games. Even if I don’t have the intention to play the game or pay much attention to it. There’s just something about reading the adventures and stresses someone goes through creating a game that I find lucrative. After a lot of thought and toying around with a couple different ideas, I decided that I would try to take a crack at writing a development blog taking people along with me to complete a game from start to finish.



Just a couple things that I would like to say before we start off with the actual game development side of things. I’m certainly not one of those uber leet game developers that’s going to crank out a mind blowing game. I am going to try to put a little bit of personality into the game to make it unique, though. If you would like to you can check out some of my other games like:





With that out of the way, let’s get started. First thing that I need before we can get into the game making is an idea. Sadly these game system ideas don’t seem to flow through me quite as easily as with some other people, so to me this can be one of the most frustrating and disheartening parts of the process. If I find that I’m struggling to come up with a good idea, I go out and do some activity that I enjoy and that also gets my mind off of thinking about the game for a while. Believe it or not this works almost every time I try it.

This time was no different from any other. I was having a hard time thinking of an idea initially, despite giving the concept of the game I was going to do a dev series on a little thought previously, so I went out and walked around for awhile so that my mind was numbed into a trance state, and like magic an idea had popped into my head by the time I was done.

I decided that I was going to make an entry level bullet hell game. What exactly did I mean by entry level? Well, basically I imagined a typical bullet hell but with a lot less bullets than you’re probably imagining making the game a lot more manageable to people who aren’t avid bullet hell fans.

Expanding On the Idea

The basic idea behind a game, while difficult to come up with, is usually the easiest part of the process. Polishing on the idea and chipping away at it until you have something good is the tricky part. I usually refine the idea a little before I start by coming up with some specific game mechanics and ideas that will fuel the game, but a majority of the polish to the design comes from testing the game and getting a feel for how things work together and what things need to change.

The first, and arguably one of the most important, things that I decided was that I was going to implement an upgrade system into this game opposed to stagnant stats or different characters. I was already debating this idea for a bit because I feel that most of the time upgrades system are used solely to make the player feel good and feel like they’re progressing rather than forcing them to actually develop their skills as they progress in the game. I decided that there’s really no alternative in this situation though, and that I’m just going to have to try to design around this. One other thing that made me kind of excited about using an upgrade system in this game is that it’s actually something I’ve never done completely in a game before, so this would be a learning experience to me (though I had started to implement it before in previous projects I had worked on so I have a general idea in my head on how it’s going to work).

Now that I knew for sure I was going to be implementing an upgrade system, I had to decide on a method for the player to acquire these upgrades. The obvious choice, and the one that I ultimately decided to go with, is to use coins that drops from the boss as you shoot at him and when he dies.

As a kind of addition to the upgrade system, and as a way to mix up the game a little more for the player, I decided that I was going to add in at least some variety of weaponry at the player’s disposal. My first idea on how this weapon system was going to work was that in addition to purchasing upgrades with the coins you collect from battle. In my mind this system had a couple problems, mainly that you could save coins early on and get a weapon you shouldn’t have in the beginning. I could design the prices to ramp up a lot for the higher level late game weapons, but I don’t ever want to inflate the in game economy to such an amount where one of the more powerful weapons might cost 20,000 whereas another weapon also available in the shop costs 200. This divide isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s something I thought I might be able to work around by implementing a drop system where weapons can only be purchased after they are dropped through a random drop system from a boss. I might face some troubles with this later on, but for now, that’s the theory.

Deciding On an Engine and a Target Platform

With enough of the design done that I could begin on the game, it was time to decide on an engine. Now for me, this one was an easy choice. Every one of my games so far have been made using GameMaker: Studio (with the exception to games made using GameMaker 8), and this one will be no different. An important thing to note, is that if you use a different tool to create games, or even if you don’t make games, you’ll still be able to follow along with this because I’m not going to be focusing as much on the technical and programming aspect of the game as I will the design choices and just general updates as I go along. In fact the only time I am going to show any of the behind the scenes programming is if I think I came up with a neat solution, or if the problem was challenging enough I think it’s worth noting as one of the struggles in creating a game.

Deciding on a target platform was a bit of a hard part for me. I really wanted to make this into an HTML5 game that can be played through the browser, but there is a couple major drawbacks to doing this that would limit me. The first one being that I have never gotten an HTML5 game to successfully work for me quite the way I wanted, which certainly makes me a bit nervous about the prospect of programming the game entirely to work on it and then having it still not for some reason. Another major drawback for me is that you can’t use particles in HTML5 with GM;S, at least not to the same success as you can using an exe. So ultimately I’m going to be programming this to work as a downloadable game, but the idea of an HTML5 version is not completely out of the picture.

Creating the Base Game

I wasted no time in starting on the game, deciding almost immediately what I wanted the first playable base of the game to look like. This is an important step of the process because it will help me in getting a sense for what programming the game is going to require, as well as allow me to tell right from the start how much fun the game is going to be and what fundamental design ideas, if any, I’m going to need to change. I decided that in order to get a good sense for all of this, the base game is going to have to include a player, a basic boss, and a basic framework for the upgrade system.

Starting out, implementing the player was a breeze. It was as simple as a constantly shooting object that the player can control. I added in the framework for a few different control schemes so that if the player wasn’t comfortable with one they could switch to another. The control option were mouse (the recommended one and the one that I would be designing the game around), keyboard, or gamepad. The final thing that the player needed was a health indicator, which I decided would be a heart based system that draws on the screen opposed to a healthbar system that I gave the boss.

Creating the first basic boss was also fairly easy. All it consists of is an object with a health variable drawing its healthbar onto the screen and shooting out bullets in a fairly simple pattern. The pattern is just 3 arms of orbiting bullets that the origin of which also spins along the boss. Nothing too complicated to that.

Implementing the upgrade system was the only part of creating the base game that actually even required any extra thought beyond my initial design conception stage, and that’s only due to the fact that I had to choose what stats I would add into the upgrade system from the start. I ended up choosing to add in Health, Speed, Damage, and Shot Speed. In the final game there’s undoubtedly going to be more stats that you can upgrade, as well as perhaps some different companions that you might be able to upgrade as well, but for now this will work.

I ended up straying slightly off plan and implementing one final thing into the game. Coins. The coins drop from the boss randomly when you hit it sometimes, can hold different values, and moves towards the player when the player gets within a close enough distance. Sadly at the moment, they effectively do nothing.





Screenshot Showing Progress After First Blog

Overall the game feels just as I imagined it would. I see a great bit of potential in expansion of this game, and already have a couple ideas in my mind on how I’m going to take it from being an ugly prototype to a full, playable game. It seemed a bit dull but I think adding in weapon variety, upgrades, and different bosses will fix this issue.

Even better than the experience I gained from creating this quick little prototype was the experience I gained from documenting the process as I did. It went a bit different than I expected it would, but I still definitely enjoy it and could see myself doing it a lot more often, perhaps even after this series ends.

Anyhow, see you in the next blog!