Indie Game The Movie My Attempt At Making A Game

Inspired by Indie Game: The Movie I had a go at making my own game.

I've always been into gaming, I remember writing code from a magazine and writing out a game for a BBC Micro, then a few years later discovering the wonders of the Command and Conquer .ini file and reprogramming it so that the dogs breathed fire.

After watching Indie Game: The Movie I was inspired to make my own game. I'm lucky in that where I live in Manchester, UK we have the wonderful Manchester GameJam headed up by @danhett.

Here I met a few people and was extremely impressed with @ClawhammerMark as he showed me a demo of the game he was working on called Chroma. I hope he gets around to finishing it one day, it's a great concept for a game.

After asking a few people there how to get started Game Maker looked like the best option for me. Unfortunately I'm a heavy mac / os x user and it seemed most gaming software is PC only. So first up I installed Windows, then got Game Maker installed along with some drivers that allowed me to use a game pad.

I was able to find a demo of a platform game and hack on top of it and had fun creating the pixel artwork, but it soon came apparent that if I wanted to add or change anything, things got a lot more complicated.

I had fun getting to where I got to, but then got increasingly frustrated with the amount of time it took to fix bugs and issues. I have a huge amount of respect for indie game developers who stick with it, keep going and create games that can compete with the likes of triple A games.

My hard disk is getting full and I'm looking to do a fresh install, hence the reason for this post. I wanted a post that I could come back to in the future to remember where I got up to and what I accomplished. I have all the files backed up, but for now my game 'zenks' is going to bed.

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