TLDR: Borheim
Download the zip from the link above, and extract to find the exe.
Over the summer of 2018 I started working on a video game in my spare time.
I have always loved games: some of my earliest memories are from my grandparents house, playing some of the board games my dad used to play. My mom introduced me to video games by showing me the arcade game Centipede, and from there it became a large part of my life. Some of my favorite memories are playing Halo 3 and Civilization 3 as a kid.
I was a busy student in middle and high school. I kept good grades, and competed athletically throughout the academic year. However, I still found time to play games in my free time. In high school I became more interested in competitive games- Starcraft II and League of Legends were the biggest attractions to me, although League eventually edged Starcraft out. Of course, I still played casual games, sinking a lot of time into Terraria, Minecraft, Civilization, and the like. Realm of the Mad God was another game that would hold particular influence over me in relation to this project; I’ll come back to this particular title later.
It was around this time that I fell in love with the way that games were able to tell stories. Magic: the Gathering was a card game that I learned in high school, and stands out to me for its world building. While the amount of actual story that is told through gameplay is relatively minimal, fans of the 30 year old game go absolutely nuts with it. The Dark Souls style of story telling- through snippets in descriptions of items, or in this case, flavor text- was particularly interesting, and guided the player’s mind with a gentle hand, rather than a narrative that was forced upon them. I find games that do this to be particularly intriguing. League of Legends, Dark Souls, and Realm of the Mad God are good examples of this in my experience as well. Items like the “Blade of the Ruined King” or “Staff of the Cosmic Whole” have such an air of mystery and prestige about them that I couldn’t help but wonder about the stories that lent these formidable weapons their namesake. To this day, I read such descriptions with a sense of awe-struck wonder about them, and it gives me a great sense of joy to imagine epic battles or terrible curses that could mark themselves into a world’s history so significantly.
In college, games became less of a focus for me, as I started enjoying other things more. In my free time I would do other things like ultimate frisbee and rock climbing, two hobbies that I really enjoy. I still found time for games though- my friends from my hometown would occasionally play, and it was a great way to keep up with them. League remained at the top of my list of favorites, others following suit. Fallout, Terraria, Battlefield, Overwatch and other major titles were games that I really enjoyed, but I also found myself playing lots of smaller, more story-heavy games that relied less on gameplay and more on tight, focused narratives to keep the player engaged. Firewatch, Oxenfree, and The Stanley Parable were highlights for me. As story telling games, these were much more like interactive movies, and I enjoyed the peaceful, thought provoking narrative they provided. Although more linear (except for The Stanley Parable) than the games I described in the previous paragraph, these games still were incredibly engaging ways to tell a story, something that I believe games can do better than any other medium that exists today.
This experience and deep appreciation for games led me to tinker about with the idea of game creation myself. While I am a computer science student, making your own game seemed like an impossibly complicated task, and although I was curious, the initial hurdle of learning how to start was incredibly daunting for a long time. During the summer of 2018, I eventually decided that the hardest part was simply starting, and so I did just that. I called a friend of mine from my hometown who I knew played a lot of DnD, and asked if he had any ideas for a story that I could use for a game that I was making.
He linked me this PDF.
It was incredible, the art style and world building he had done was beyond anything that I expected. Immediately my eyes lit up, and my heart starting beating faster- this was something that I knew I could run with. Thoughts of medieval villages, goblin armies, towering stone fortresses and secluded elvish tribes flooded my mind. What I had thought would be the hardest part had been kick started by this work, and I was so excited.
Of course, I didn’t stick to what the PDF said. What it ultimately provided for me was an idea that started my world, and let me begin working. I started later that day, and found myself awake at 4 AM, with a workday swiftly approaching.
Over the next couple months, I sank hours into the project, learning about GameMaker, watching YouTube tutorials, and thinking about directions I could take this project. I had never been so excited about anything in my life. I was doing something that I loved, something that I could make a career out of, and it was effortless. I had to force myself to stop every night, knowing that I would be exhausted the next day; regardless, I found myself regularly wide awake at 3 AM, designing a new weapon or working on the back end of the game.
What proved to be the hardest and most time consuming was the art design and sprite work. Hand drawing each animation pixel by pixel was incredibly time consuming and I had to redo tile maps more times than I could count. While I was able to reference some materials online, I did much of the sprite work myself from scratch. The beach, sewer, and inn (which make up the demo version linked below) are done almost completely by hand, as are the weapons and armors. Character models had to be drawn for 4 directions, including walking animations, room to allow for appearance changes based on equipment, attack frames, etc…. The sprite work was by far the most difficult part for me to work on, due to volume of material that I had to create.
Everything else I found tutorials for or designed myself as well. The inventory system was incredibly hard to design, and were it not for this tutorial I would have spent an entire month just designing that one part. Combat and art style were influenced heavily by Realm of the Mad God, a pixelated mmo bullet hell that I sunk hours into in high school. The combat was fluid and I really enjoyed the drop mechanics, and I wanted to include that in my own game. I recall the animation math of lining up the right frame of the sword in the right place depending on the phase of the attack animation being very difficult, even though it only lasts 3 or 4 frames.
By the end of the summer I had a demo version that I was mostly happy with. It contains a small introduction, a small section of gameplay, and leaves the player mostly clueless about the direction of the plot. It serves mostly as a way for me to test various game sections that I want to include in the future, like boss fights, save states, enemy types, weapon types, NPC interaction, cutscenes, dialog, and level design. The link is below: just extract the zip and run the .exe.
I really enjoy working on this, and I’ll likely continue to tinker with it in the future. I’ve found that the artwork is the limiting factor in my progression, so finding time to put on some music and doodle some sprites is probably where I’ll start.
Andy Gallup 