Personal Project

I’ve been working on a personal project for a little while (started late last year) using Game Maker to build a real-time strategy game for the GX games platform (formerly Opera GX). It’s a great new platform for web based games that I think has a lot of potential, and it reminds me of the old Flash days when hobbyists could easily share their quirky experimental games. Which also just so happens to be how I started my game dev career (that and tinkering with a very early version of the unreal engine making Unreal Tournament maps).

The game itself is based on a jam game I made for the same platform, taking inspiration from well known sci-fi RTS games like Command and Conquer, Star Craft, and Supreme Commander. Mixing in elements of management games where logistics are an important part of the gameplay. The aim is to focus more on combat and micro-ing units with the economic or macro side being a smaller part of the game. Thanks to the GX games platform having a built-in multiplayer solution with rollback support I’ll be able to build this as a competitive game first. Though I do also plan on adding options for single player.

Visually I’m aiming for something akin to a mix between Dune, Blade Runner, Akira, the works of H.R. Giger and of course the previously mentioned RTS games. Imagine lots of sand, brutalist architecture, destroyed cities, barren wastelands, chunky mechs, strange mutated creatures, and sci-fi tech.

Story-wise the premise is of a barren world, long abandoned by those that resided there, crumbling, rusting, turning to dust. All that lingers are the mutated violent creatures evolved as an amalgamation of the remnants of what was. Along with the robotic drones left behind by civilisation, fragmented, and condemned by their programming to forever pick at what resources are available, endlessly gathering, building, and destroying anything they perceive as a threat.

Admittedly I’m not looking to reinvent the wheel, just hopefully make a good game that draws from the long tradition of the RTS genre. Currently there’s not much to show off, the priority has been to build the tools and back end code I’ll need to then make the game. It’s a slow stage in the game development cycle, lots of work with little to show off but it’s worth getting the foundations right before attempting to build anything on top of them. Here’s just a small little peak at a quick test of the map editor for now until there’s more to show off later.