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In order to give you a hint of what to expect from anything I might release, I decided to make a post about it. Yay for posts!

Inspiration

There are several developers and artists that provide me with a healthy dose of inspiration. Jonatan Söderström (aka Cactus) has recently stunned me with his and Dennis Wedin's upcoming release Hotline Miami. Derek Yu's famous roguelike Spelunky is excellent. When doubting the power of the Game Maker software, the elite of the community always came back and crushed those doubts. It made me want to become better and understand more, and it paid off.

That said, it's not only people known for creating things in the relatively simple Game Maker that has inspired or gotten my attention. Team Meat blew me away with Super Meat Boy, and then half of Team Meat made me cry of joy with The Binding of Isaac. This post is turning silly, because everyone love those titles. What I want to say is that there's no shortage of inspiration. I currently have about twelve indie titles unplayed on Steam after the Summer Sale. That's plenty of ideas right there.

"FUCK NO! NOT THE STEAM SALE!!" - Wallet

Personal Approach

Most of the prototypes and unfinished projects I have created has been focused on telling a story. That has been my personal challenge - to tell a story with the aid of gameplay. Somewhere along I realised that no one playing a free indie title would give a crap unless the story was incredible. It was beyond my ability because of the limited work I had done in the field. And the games got boring quickly, based on gameplay solely.



Today there's a different mentality from my side. I try to experiment with gameplay more than anything. I want to create a consistently fun and challenging game, where the story should only be a sort of bonus. It took me a year and a half to figure this out, even though I'm an avid player of exactly that type of games. It's more about the general themes and feel of the game than the actual story (Super Meat Boy and The Binding of Isaac are perfect examples of this).



One thing I made that was kind of fun.



My current project tries out some different things. My initial idea was to remake something I threw together years ago. It was a top down game with Atari-inspired visuals where the objective was to save your people that had been kidnapped by *insert whatever evil here*. You simply ran around and beamed them up to your ship when you found them, and finished a level when everyone was safe and sound. So I threw together something quick. It was, of course, boring and simple. So I added a gun mechanic, that also controlled the camera view. This was fun and looked interesting, but gettng the controls to work was a nightmare. So I settled on a simple "shoot-towards-mouse" feature, and started looking around for other, interesting things to implement.

The current version (subject to change, mind you) I would describe as a cross between VVVVVV and The Binding of Isaac, sprinkled with a little bullet hell. This might sound awkward and complicated, but it works surprisingly well (of course, no one has tried it yet, but hey). More on this when I get closer to releasing a full preview/devlog.

TWITTER

On a different note, I just got twitter. Yay for technical achievements! Follow @swordpond to get what this blog offers, but less... Kind of. Will add a feed to this blog as well, because that's how everyone else does it and I like everyone want to be a tweeter because its awsum i think lol kthxbai.