Cyberpunk Sidescroller

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  Game Preview

Inspiration

The inspiration comes from various metroidvania games and dungeon crawlers such as Hades, Katana Zero, Touhou Luna Knights, and Hollow Knight. Many of these games offer some degree of freedom, but we wanted to create something that would allow the players to feel like they can do anything.

What it does

At the moment, we only have 1 room where the player is a cube that can jump around and collect a speed boost with respawns after the effects of it wear off. You're able to double jump and dash as well.

How we built it

We've used GameMaker Studio 2 to build the game, mainly for its user-friendly design and variety of tools for 2D games.

Challenges we ran into

Some of the biggest challenges were figuring out the inner workings of Gamemaker Studio. Both of us had no experience using the software and didn't have any prior experience to base it on. So we were going in blind.

The most challenging thing I ran into was trying to implement animations correctly, which ended up eating hours and hours of my time and unfortunately stumped me badly. When I finally got it working correctly, the tileset disappeared so in the end, I couldn't upload the animation changes in time due to this error and not having much time left.

Specifically, programming the movement, trying to implement animation, and figuring out the Gamemaker programming language was a huge hurdle and frankly still is. However, the longer we played with it the more it made sense. We've ran into plenty of bugs such as the player sliding down stairs, teleporting left and right when you tried to switch directions, and so forth.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting the movement to work was one of our biggest highlights. Because we had such an emphasis on movement to make sure the player feels like they can have a sort of "adrenaline rush", it's extremely important that it works. It's also one of our biggest programming challenges because we've never played with the language before. Seeing the character move fluidly is something extremely accomplished as a developer.

So, yeah, I think we are just proud that we were honestly able to get some stuff going even with the many errors we ran into. We got to see how it was possible to implement some of your ideas and flavors into the game and that was awesome.

What we learned

We've learned a lot on this project. How to build a world, how to program movement, how objects interact with each other, collision, and a bunch of other technical skills. Outside of just game development, we understand what it's like to develop a game. How things work, how to use source control, and things important for the development cycle.

We learned how good of an engine game maker is and how it's constantly evolving, it was good to figure out our way around certain mechanics and implement them into the game. It's undone but I like to think working on this has given me motivation to do more with Gamemaker and other game engines in the feature.

What's next for Cyberpunk Sidescroller

We hope to further develop the game into something cooler. Add more levels, enemies, abilities, various attacks, and a HUD. We have a lot of visions for the game, and we want to play around with ridiculous things that we can do. Parry a bomb? Sure. Create platforms out of thin air? Why not? Call upon a planet to slam upon a boss? Oh yeah! Of course, there will be a lot of challenges because these things all work differently from each other, but like how we programmed the movement, dash, and speed boost, I'm sure we can figure it out.

Built With

• gamemaker
• gamemaker(language)
• github