GameMaker Studio 2 engine

Hi there! And welcome to the first in a series of articles on the development of Globe Cannon, a retro arcade shooter releasing Summer of 2019. My name is ChainsawMcD and I wanted to start this DevLog by taking a step back and exploring some big-picture questions before we dive into the meat of the matter.

First of all... Who are you?

I'm a screenwriter living in Los Angeles, although you've almost certainly never heard of me. For the last ten years, I've been working in various capacities around the entertainment industry. I've written for cable TV and sold a few unproduced scripts. I'm 35 years old, married to a beautiful wife and the proud owner of a Jack Russell Terrier.

Wait... You don't sound like a game maker...

Yes, that's very astute of you. Up until this moment right now, I have not been a game maker.

So... Why are you making a game?

For a few reasons:

1. First and foremost, there has never been a better time to make a game than right now.

There are mountains of material designed to help beginning game developers all over YouTube, Reddit, Discord... Anywhere you bother looking, really. People are sitting in chat rooms right now waiting to help people like me who don't know what they're doing. That's incredible. Why WOULDN'T I take advantage of that goodwill? Especially since...

2. I'm a life-long gamer.

I know this isn't something that will set me apart from the readers on this site but I'm actually a rare breed amongst my colleagues. Since I was a kid I've been playing video games, letting them entertain and engage me. Despite my work in the entertainment industry, I've never given back to the games that have given me so much enjoyment over the years. So, if nothing else, I think making a game will teach me to appreciate what I already play a lot more.

3. I just finished a script and don't have any work lined up. I could take this time to write and produce a play or something, waste a bunch of time, probably not even make my money back... that's what a lot of writers would do in my situation. But that sounds boring.

Instead, I chose to waste a bunch of time and probably not even make my money back by making a VIDEO GAME.

Ok. So why make THIS game?

To put me out of my comfort zone while keeping the project within a realistic scope.

Given my day job, you might think I'd go straight for an RPG or something with a good amount of story. But I deliberately wanted to make a game without narrative or dialogue. To really push me outside of my comfort zone.

But it also needed to be a project that I could finish in a reasonable amount of time. I do not have years to work on this, unfortunately. I have a few months before I need to find other work.

And why are you telling us this?

Because I want to be very clear about what this DevLog will be. It's not a tutorial series, it's not a how-to. I simply don't know enough to do either of those. This won't be like those polished blogs from established developers, dropping pearls of wisdom. This is more like a crime scene report. It's an honest recounting of a digital adventure I undertook a few weeks back.

This isn't how you do it, this is how I did it. These are the mistakes I made. These are the assumptions that were proven untrue. This is the unvarnished truth from someone who doesn't know better than to tell it just the way it's happening.

I really hope you'll join me.

New articles will be published weekly, at a minimum.