"DRONE", my first attempt at a game (In progress!)

Hey all! My game is still in it’s baby steps, but I thought I’d create a thread just to keep progress of it.

DRONE is an idea I’ve had for a long time, and I’ve tried to make it before but couldn’t wrap my head around writing code- but thanks, thanks so dearly, to GDevelop, I have a nice visual way to do it and boy does it make everything so much buttery smoother and streamlined. You guys behind this software are so, so fantastic! :heart:

Anyway, I’ll just drop some videos I recorded of my game progressing. I don’t really know if I’ll be able to finish this one day, but who knows? If there’s any luck…!
I’m gonna copy and paste the descriptions for the videos, since I already wrote them;

"Hey all, I cobbled together this very small platformer in around a day. Right now, It’s just this small test area. I’m not sure whether I’m going to see this through and turn it into an actual project, but we’ll see. I probably won’t though, lmaooooo!
I coded this whole thing in GDevelop, but not all of the sprites are mine- just the robot characters. All of the scenery and background are not mine. I’ll replace them with my own hand drawn ones if I ever decide to do something with this."

"My apologies for the terrible video quality this time around.
*In this game, you play as a standard “Drone” robot AKA a D-Series robot. There’s an enemy variant already, which stands, turns to face you and fires at you when it sees you. *
I’ve managed to program another variant, one that patrols a set area- like the spider- until it spots you, which then sets it’s behaviour to something way more aggressive.
By the way, I’m thinking of naming the game “DRONE”. What do you think of that title?"

"Hey all. Again, I must apologise for the quality of the footage- it’s just the recording, the actual game doesn’t have the compression issues. I have to make the window very small in order to record it, and then stretch the footage to make it bigger for the actual video.

Anyway, I managed to program destructible crates. These crates can be destroyed by both you and the enemies. They contain health pickups if you’re at low health, but if the enemies are the one that destroyed the crate, they have less chance of having anything inside.

I also added the spreadshot weapon, which is arguably the best type of shooting weapon in these types of games- well, that’s my opinion, at least. This gun fires three bullets at different angles, but is slower than the regular gun’s fire rate to compensate for it.

I still don’t know if this game will ever see completion- after all, I tend to lose motivation really fast with pretty much anything I do. But as I keep saying…who knows?"

"Hey all! I’m not feeling that well today, but I’m still working on the game- which is still likely to never be a fully-fledged game, lol.

As you can see, I’m adding vertical levels- or at least trying to add them. This one is only halfway designed, and the graphics are nowhere near finished. I don’t even have a proper sprite for the flying platforms either.

I also changed the Sentry’s behaviour so that it doesn’t fly through everything. It now follows the easiest path to you and veers past walls and ground to get there.

The music is mine, as usual."

"Hey all!
WWWEEEUUWW…(That’s a dramatic sigh!)
This boss. This boss right here has drained about five years off my life. It took so long to program, and every time I fixed a problem, about 5 new ones would pop up- like the world’s least dangerous yet most irritating Hydra.

I ended up having to seek help online for this one, and thanks to some wonderful, wonderful people at the GDevelop forums, I was able to figure out the issues and get it working.
(Thank you especially, Phenomena!–)

*As you can see, there’s no real cutscene yet, or an outro. But that’s fine. That will come eventually. But for now, it’s time to take a break! *

By the way, this boss is named MASTER SENTRY. It’s a robot that broadcasts radio signals."

My next step is to take a break from the levels and work on a menu. I also have a story to tell, which I’m not going to go into here yet, so I think I’ll have small text-based cutscenes between levels.

And by the way…I do intend to delve into some horror in this game. It’s not gonna be all lighthearted.

3 Likes

Looks like it’s coming along great! Glad I could help :slight_smile: :purple_heart:

1 Like

The game looks great! The good thing about your tiles and sprites is that they have a very “organic” feel to them. Good job also on the color tone and shading on the game stage. Makes them all the more believable.

I’d like to suggest you change your BGM though, they are too “laid back” for your platform shooter. Maybe go for something with more urgency, something like this:

Either way, i will be watching this space, throw in some plot twist and turns in your campaign and you’ll have a winner. Good job!

Oh, thank you! I still need to work a lot on the stage graphics, I need to actually make proper tilesets for one, so that everything doesn’t have sharp edges.
As for the music, I make it myself! I do have some more intense ones waiting, but I wanted a kind of…“classy sadness” to my robot?
What you hear in the second video is the main theme of the game. It’s mainly based on the theme of E-102 GAMMA FROM Sonic Adventure!

By the way, I still don’t really know what direction I want the graphics to go in. My ideal look would be that of a good 16 bit SNES game, like Super Metroid, but I’m terrible at pixel art and I’m growing attached to the “old Flash game” look it has.

This reminds me on the good old Turrican Days on my beloved AMMIIIGGAAAAA!!!