Last night I was bored.

And as it so happens, when I get bored I either end up playing a lot of games or trying to make one.

I settled on the latter for a change.

Since I want to take part in the Ludum Dare October Challenge, I thought that I need to make something both familiar to me mechanics-wise, easy to create art and music for and easy to pump out by the end of the month.

So, after digging through my collection of 500+ GMKs and old games, I settled on remaking Cycore, one of the first platformers I showed off on this site, and turning it into a gamier game.

The original was really simple, both in terms of gameplay and graphics. What I've decided to do is to make the gameplay a bit more complex, but keep the minimal graphics style for as long as I can.

That way, I'll have more time for game elements and will probably have something by month's end.

Progress #1 Sunday

Spent most of the day mucking around with shaders. Finally settled on this:

It's a radial distortion shader with scanlines, and a bit of single-pixel bloom to create somewhat of a "ghosting" effect like a lot of old CRT monitors and TVs used to have.

Progress #2 Monday

Now with the Copious Amounts of Free Time™ I have available to me, I made progress like crazy in exchange for a mere two hours of work.

It started with this:

And ended up with this:

I'm not going with the complete "Single solid color pixel characters", and am instead going for 3-color sprites without too much complexity, just to draw attention to interactive objects and such. The walls will probably remain simple.

Oh, and I somehow made a semi-complex Pause/Map menu:

My pause system is a bit more refined than I normally make it. Usually, I just skip adding a pause menu altogether if I can.

The few games I've made that do pause, I've used a global "paused" variable that only affects certain objects, and stops them from doing anything.

This was silly.

This system creates a pause object over everything, and this first of all lets the play-screen render for one more frame and captures it in a surface (using view_surface_id). Then it draws this, draws a darkened overlay, disabled everything and finally creates its objects (There's a map object, for instance).

The 'action' in the background stays paused perfectly, and doesn't require any extra logic in any of the game's objects: Pausing is entirely its own mechanism, and has full control of itself.

Well, let's see if I finish this. I'll add more progress if I have more progress.

EDIT: As an aside, I'm using Game Maker Studio Standard, mostly because I've gone into "No bullshit" mode and just want to make "a game" without giving the slightest damn about what I'm making it in, just what allows me to churn out my idea the fastest and with minimal fuss.