Level Design
After much thinking, I'm likely to build out the universe/level/story design system using HTML/CSS/PHP/JS/MySQL. It may sound a bit odd, but with this type of game it actually makes a lot of sense. Most everything is laid out in a 2D array when it comes to sectors and...
Updated UI
I've been going over the fundamentals of the game design and figured the first thing I needed to do was finalize a basic UI layout. Ended up brainstorming a bit with John Kelly on things and we threw a bunch of ideas back and forth. Most of what we came up with was...
New Crew Members!
I've brought two new peeps to the team! John Kelly from Screaming Brain Studios has joined the project to help with level design, UI stuff, among other things. He's the guy who did the planets in the game, so he's familiar with what I'm going for. Plus, he and I have...
About The Game
Sector Defector is the 2D space game I’ve been wanting to build since I was a kid. I’ve taken the fun bits of various 2D games and rolled them into a single design that I’m sure will have me running into many walls (already has!). But, whatever, it’s fun and I wanna do it.
Effectively, it’s going to be an adventure that feels a bit like the old Epic Games Solar Winds title, but with some additional twists and turns. It’ll be deeper than that, though I’m probably going to avoid the tree-style storyline, keeping it linear instead. That’ll be made up for by all the other junk the player will need to do in order to complete missions.
The player will be able to get upgrades to a degree, but not through monetary means. I don’t plan on putting any economy stuff in this as I personally am not a fan of economy-based games. They always feel like the entire purpose is just to build bigger and bigger ships. That’s cool and I get why people dig it, but it’s been done a billion times and I’m honestly not going to be able to hold a candle to what devs who love that style of game can do.
“Write what you know,” as they say, and I don’t know economy-based games all that well since I generally try to avoid them. 😀
Anyway, the means by which players will be able to insert upgrades is gonna be different than in most games. As time goes on, that will become apparent!
Also, as an author, I write predominently comedy, which means there will be a lot of odd shit in this game. I can’t help it, and I wouldn’t even if I could. 😉
Right, well, that’s the basics behind Sector Defector. If you wanna read my Devblog, check it out on the right. If you want to learn more about me, look below.
About Me
My name is John P. Logsdon and I was in the games industry for a long time, doing everything from coding front-ends as a contractor for GEnie, producing games for Interplay’s online division ENGAGE Games Online, coding mass-market games for America Online, and even writing a couple of game development books for two old-skool languages (BlitzBasic and PureBasic).
I then stepped away from all that and became a full-time author, having written or co-written over 100 novels. If you wanna check them out, jump over to JohnPLogsdon.com.
It’s been a blast, for sure, but this one game has nagged at me forever and I’m finally at a point where I must do it!
I checked out multiple games engines, including Godot, Unreal, Unity, etc. After much ado, I’ve landed on using GameMaker Studio 2 as the platform of choice. I already owned it from years back and was familiar with it. Yes, it’s got some annoyances, of course, but it seems all engines do. When weighing the various options GMS2 just fit my way of thinking the best. There will no doubt be regrets of my selection, but gotta start somewhere!