Games
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BeardedBear
[The development is: Suspended]BeardedBear is my biggest project on which I worked on. I developed it for almost 3.5 years during my university life. I started the project alone and worked on it for almost a year before Alberto, a friend of mine, started to help me out with sound and programming. After another year Giacomo, another friend from university, joined the team and helped us with pixel art.
Sadly, the project got suspended after some problems with the team and I couldn't keep up alone.
The prototypes
The game started out as a little learning experiment by trying to clone SuperCrateBox and adding realistic physics to it. At this stage the project was targetting mobile and was developed with Lua and CoronaSDK.
After messing around with the game for a while I started to feel that a touchscreen wasn't really a good fir for a platformer game, so I started to recreate it for PC keeping Lua but switching to Love2D.
A few months passed by, more features was added to the game, and Lua was feeling inadequate for a game with a growing scope like that. So I decided to throw everything in the trash again and restart one final time with GameMaker:Studio.
Now the unnecessary realistic physics was scrapped away and the game started to have some quite unique mechanics.
The features
These are the main features of the game:
- Weapons are time based and only lasts 15 seconds before they overheat and explode.
- Each weapon is generated by combining a random weapon type and a random bullet type. Anything can come out (For example: flamethrowers that shoots rockets, lightning pistols, minigun that shoots other miniguns, and more).
- Each enemy killed drops exp. If the player grabs them up he will eventually level up and choose a powerup. Else the exp goes to the enemies and if they level up the player is forced to choose a power up for them.
- The player needs to survive and kill enough enemies in the level to spawn a time portal to go to the next level.
- The weapons can be picked up by grabbing a crate. Every time a crate is picked up, a new one respawns somewhere in the level.
The game has more little features and things here and there that made it unique, but here I'll only explain the core ones. If you are interested you can learn more details from the references links on the bottom of this page!
The experience
After 3 years of the development and a team of 3 people working on it, the project was starting to feel really good and polished so we had the chance to present the game in a couple of conventions and events.
Presenting a game to the public in real life and talk to them while they experience the game is a priceless experience and a really crucial thing to do when trying to beta test the game and understand what could be improved and what needs changes.
Even if the game got suspended, it occupies a special spot in my heart for being my first real game and coding project. It has been a huge learning experience.