User blog:C3PO the Dragon Slayer/Game Maker update

Hello, Star Wars Fanon. It is about time I get the public up to speed on what I've been doing in my game-making endeavors recently, and now is as good a time as any to enlighten you.

First off, I have temporarily paused production on Avian Hunt because for the first time, I am entering a Game Maker competition. This competition's theme is to design a handheld game, requiring the controls to be nothing but the arrow keys and the space bar, and the screen dimensions to be at max 480x272. Avian Hunt, which uses the WASD keys and the mouse and has a screen resolution of 800x600, obviously doesn't qualify, so instead a friend and I are creating an original sci-fi shooter that parodies StarFox 64. The game, called Cylon Marauders, is a 3D scrolling shooter that tells the story of Dingo and his mercenary friends Flippy, Bobby, and Njordsier, who help a pirate Khanate recover a stolen treasure: a beautiful gem carved into 64 perfect facets by natural forces alone. To do so, the player must fight over various planets to crush an insurgency against the Khanate's rule, shooting, dodging, and above all, barrel rolling. We have some great bosses and hilarious dialogue planned for this game, so make sure you give it a play when it is released.

Progress on this game is going rather well; the competition deadline is March 30, so expect this game to be released by then.

In other news, Ace and Commander (click here to play) has been rather well-received by Yoyogames, with around the 30-40th highest rating of any shooter on the site (new games with first rates of 5 often bump it around temporarily). One Yoyogames user who played the game requested that I put Zann Consortium ships into the game and supplied me with the necessary resources, including authentic Empire at War sounds, to do so. I intend to update Ace and Commander shortly after releasing Cylon Marauders.

Finally, the Avian Hunt front. First off, I have good news, confirming that Ultimate 3D is NOT the source of the problem uploading the Avian Hunt demo. The bad news is I still don't know what it was exactly, so I have to redo everything in a new game folder to prevent it from happening again. This isn't as devastating a setback as it might sound, but it will take a bit of work to get back to the level I had before. I also discovered a handy modeling tool that lets me easily create good-looking low-poly Game Maker models, which will put less strain on the processor, but let me make detailed textures much more easily (so no more monochrome ships like the one you see to the right).

The real setback comes from the point during testing when I realized that Avian Hunt's flight portion, which makes up the entirety of the non-strategy action in the game, becomes repetitive all too quickly. I received this complaint from a couple of friends who tested the demo for me, and noticed it myself after a while. I must therefore come up with ways to keep the gameplay fresh and compelling all the way through the story, without the player getting bored of the flight combat. I am considering several options, which include recycling the 2D Ace and Commander engine (though I'd prefer to keep it 3D), making an auto-resolve function like Empire at War's (though I haven't yet figured out a reliable algorithm for this), and simply making the actual 3D battles rarer in the course of the game so the novelty doesn't wear off as quickly. I will resume work on Avian Hunt when Cylon Marauders and the Ace and Commander update are finished.