It’s been roughly 2 years since I joined up with a few friends to form a small independent game studio we called Sick Fish Studios. Brent is a friend of mine and one day while we were hanging out at band practice he mentioned that he had been working on a video game and I had to see what he was talking about. He pulled up a few demos for me in Game Maker Studio 2. The first was a full 2D top down action rpg story demo complete with cutscenes, dialogue, sword fighting, gun shooting, grenade throwing combat. The second was actually an online multiplayer game with similar art styling and played right in the browser. This demo consisted of a large open arena and you played as just a guy with a bow as his weapon. Anyone who also logged on joined the game and you would duke it out by firing arrows back and forth dashing and launching triple arrow special attacks at each other endlessly.
It turned out that most of the members of the band I was in had also always wanted to build a video game and after seeing the demo’s we all decided to collaborate to build the game that Brent had started in the years before we formed the band Ante-Madder (link).
Since Brent had built his demos using Game Maker Studio 2 and had the most experience in that engine it made the most sense to continue using that engine. The plan was to build a 2D action rpg with an online PVP mode and a story that you could play co-op online, but that was also like jumping into the deep end for our first game. The only experience I had with anything related to game development was a few online courses using Unity so for the first few months I spent on Youtube following tutorials from Friendly Cosmonaut to learn the ins and outs of Game Maker as well as Adam C Yonis for aseprite and the Pixel Architect for level editing using pixel art. We had some meetings and discussed the story line and started outlining the the game to get a good idea of the scope we were looking at for the game.
The first thing we needed to do was figure out how we wanted to build the game and what systems and mechanics needed to be in the game in order for us to get the project going. Along the way we have had to over come many challenges like netcode for smooth multiplayer play and depth sorting and creating levels with the illusion of elevation. Early on in our talks we realized that the scope of our game was quickly growing out of control. We decided the best way to deal with the scope was to build a smaller game first but build the systems and mechanics up in a way that would allow us to expand on later. The first class we built for our rpg was the base Vagabond class who wore worn out brown clothes and who’s main weapons were their fists and the rocks they had to throw. The Vagabond was nicknamed the Bum class internally and the running joke eventually evolved into the project we’re working on today BUM FIGHTS! Over the past 2 years we’ve overcame many challenges and it’s amazing how we’ve evolved as a studio.
I started this blog as a way to share the challenges we faced building our game and to document our progress as we go. For this blog series I’ll go over different aspects like combat, netcode, and other systems / mechanics we’ve built using Game Maker Studio 2 . If you’re curious about the game and want to beta test we’ll be making the announcements in our Discord Server and I’ll be posting here as well. The next post I’m planning in this series will be focused on building our games multiplayer mode.