Welcome to this small personal project of mine. A few words about myself, I'm 25 as of writing this and have been desiring to get involved with game programming for quite some time now. I have some IT apprenticeships, game development courses and many typical small practice games behind me to get me started. I've also contributed numerous bug reports and suggestions to many games over the years, quite a few of which have been used by the according developers.
Unsurprisingly I had many ideas for games over the years. RPGs, turn based and real time strategy games, various types of shooters and even a few more adult oriented games were among them.
After trying some things with a couple of small voluntary teams, which more often than not haven't worked out because one or multiple members of the team were held down by life and being busy, I decided to go with one of my own ideas that I felt I could do best on my own. That's HexaShock.
I've always liked various sorts of arcade shooters, but I'm not gonna lie, while I consider myself good or very good at most games, bullet hells aren't really for me. The disparity of super resilient enemies and a super vulnerable player always felt weird to me, and more often than not raised the question if enemies couldn't just use a better formation or a sweeping beam to reduce your chances to 0%. Then there's having long range lasers yourself but not being able to see or even hit enemies beyond the screen.
Thus one of my goals for HexaShock was to come up with mechanics that could be neatly tied into a functioning and consistent story and world, in part to challenge myself, in part to see where it would lead me. This ultimately led me to the mechanics I currently have planned, such as enemies warping into the battle with the exception of some capital ships, the subsequent warp disruption and the defensive player mechanics, for which I'll make separate articles further down the road.
Now since I'm working alone so far, and there's lots of other stuff I have to do, I can't really make a fixed schedule for anything, and I just have to move things along as I can. I plan to finish this project one way or another next year, but if necessary and appropriate I might hold onto it longer. We'll see.
I also consider releasing it for Windows/Mac/Linux, but that might change depending on whether I'll be able to test and debug properly on all the platforms, and whether the interest warrants the effort.
How far I'll take this project really depends on whether I can get funding and/or a small team down the road or not.
If I'll have to work unfunded and alone on this project I'll aim for something presentable but not awesome, focusing on the raw gameplay mechanics. The result will likely be a free game for a bit of fun, without a story and rather mediocre music, sound, as well as player and enemy models. While I think I can make some awesome looking effects via fractal animations, I simply lack experience to make the rest anywhere near as good.
Should I be able to get funding or a team though I might aim to make a complete marketable game, with a full story that might include optional VN elements to convey to the player what's happening and what their mission is. Without spoiling too much, the mission would be too invade a foreign planet and crush a newly established dictatorship to disarm the potential for an interplanetary full scale war. The player ship would be on a much higher tech level than the opposing forces, which will be balanced out by sheer numbers, and sometimes the size of enemies.
Thank you for your interest if you bothered reading all of this, and I hope I can see this project through to fruition.
