Mothership - Humble Beginnings
I've been working on Mothership on and off since about spring 2014, but the development hasn't been so much the continuous development of one game, rather an ongoing development and iteration of a few different projects threaded together by some common themes; eventually turning into what it is today (and will mostly be for the final release), pictured on the main page and at the bottom of the screen.
The first prototype, pictured above, was much more heavily influenced by action games like Devil May Cry than your typical Metroid/Castlevania mix. The game starts (and mostly stays) in a lush green cavern, with the player, a robotic ninja, navigating through the space, solving item and platforming puzzles, and fighting sentry robots with his trusty laser shuriken and a disproportionately outdated silver sword. The game is heavily centered around comboing, with two sword buttons and one shuriken button, allowing you to hit enemies up into the air, and juggle them with your lasers and sword.
This first project served as the foundation for a lot of the mechanics seen in the game now, despite this initial prototype playing much differently (try Prototype A HERE). First, it served to teach me game development, since I had never done any programming in my life and the only experience I had with GameMaker was creating some crappy zelda clones and an mp3 player in my early teens. Looking back, the code is pretty abysmal, and I used a lot of drag-and-drop shortcuts for whatever reasons.
After completing the first prototype, I abandoned game development for a while and focused mostly on creating new music. About a year later, in spring 2015, I started again on a new project, only using a select few sprites from the old prototype, which had borrowed most of it's tileset from a free download and some sprites from the original Castlevania for the NES. I went in with a strict vision, an action-exploration game where your choices matter, supplies are low, and everything is deadly. I wanted to create all of my own assets, and I took my visual design from a mix of thatgamecompany's Journey and the surrealist paintings of Salvador Dali and Zdzisław Beksiński (along with a healthy dose of Dr. Seuss), and later the works of Tsutomu Nihei once I discovered his phenomenal manga, BLAME!
Thus started the development of the second prototype, one that had many ups and downs and was pretty ugly for a while and was the subject of lot of of poking, prodding, and experimentation. For example, the game for the longest time was locked to 8 directions, and the decision to unlock your aim into a full 360 degrees did not come without some tumultuous inner conflict to go along with it. I think it was worth it, though, as eventually, through willpower, perseverance, and dedication to make it all not a waste of time I pressed on and turned that prototype into what will eventually be the full game. At the time of writing, the game is currently in Alpha, with a demo on it's way soon and a release announcement sometime after the game has reached beta.
