[Game] My abandoned Knytt Underground homage

From March to May 2020 I spent hundreds of hours in lockdown learning GameMaker Studio 2 and doing (and extending) other people's tutorial games. I decided to make a start on my first game, which was going to be my homage / unofficial spiritual mequel* to the wonderful Knytt Underground.

After putting dozens of hours into perfecting movement before anything else (including bashing my head against a brick state machine), I started messing about with room transitions, a scrolling level, some very Knytt-like animated plants and mist effects in the background, and a nifty dust animation when jumping and landing.

Anyway, here's an audio-free video I recently made showing what I had done...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNqybLQ5LNU

This is an earlier video that I made after perfecting the movement, with some talky bits...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CCJR1nPNL0

Unfortunately I experienced burnout, and all the game dev I was doing was affecting my work as a web dev. I also came to realise that I might have picked the wrong game engine after looking at Godot, which is far more powerful, elegant, lightweight and flexible than GameMaker, which I grew to dislike because it's so unnecessarily convoluted, cumbersome and disjointed - you spend half your time fighting the UI.

I then started thinking whether I should be putting so much time and energy into making something that was not wholly original. Even though I was brimming over with other ideas, I just couldn't see any of them ever coming to fruition. I ultimately gave in to my doubts in my abilities and gave up entirely... because game dev is hard and I'm too old.

However, I've recently been tinkering with Godot again, and also looking at the Defold game engine, which is even more elegant than Godot, and has better platform export options. I've felt enthused to make a few more realistically achievable small games in one of those, and then maybe pick up where I left off with my Knytt 'clone', and convert what I did in GameMaker.

* mequel, a cringy concatenation of the words 'me' and 'sequel' that I might have just invented. Sorry.

I understand you. I've spent way too much time playing with other peoples' IPs and improving other peoples' games when I should have been making my own stuff. I usually get slogged down in graphical asset production, especially animations. But, with all my failures I've learned something, improved my skills, and had fun up to a point.

I understand you. I've spent way too much time playing with other peoples' IPs and improving other peoples' games when I should have been making my own stuff. I usually get slogged down in graphical asset production, especially animations. But, with all my failures I've learned something, improved my skills, and had fun up to a point.

Yeah, I've been there before regarding assets - several years back I messed about with RPG Maker VX to create an adventure game featuring my nieces and nephews as characters, and got carried away creating sprites and cartoon character pics that looked like them, as well as tile sets to match the contents of their house!

I gave up on that game after producing just about a third of my introductory section. It wasn't a complete waste though, as last year I went back to it, polished it up and made it a self-contained little story, and I gave it to them all as a bonus Xmas present. It had about 20-30 minutes of gameplay and was cute and fun.

Anyway, from that I learnt to start small, plan things out, get your mechanics and flow sorted, and worry about the graphics and audio-visuals later.

Still, sometimes it helps to get something pretty in there - adding the background visuals to this demo really gave it a 'vibe' (though obviously not a very original one!)