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Skein is an old-school-style dungeon shooter currently in development. Taking a leaf from the Gauntlet school of games, Skein is a fast paced one or two player (co-op) game where you battle through hordes of monsters on a quest to save the soul of a talking sheep. The game features hundreds of enemies, a huge number of spells, 6 different playable characters and procedural dungeons with secret rooms, traps and all!

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What's New In Skein?

What's New In Skein?

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It's been some time since I posted about Skein, so I thought I better update people on progress. New sound, new HUD, new graphics, Steam integration and...

Black Triangle Days

Black Triangle Days

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In this newest dev diary, I'm going to talk a bit about what's been going on behind the scenes in the game, since visually not a lot has changed in the...

Sound? What sound?

Sound? What sound?

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I've been ignoring sound a bit in my dev diaries, so it's time to fix that and talk about how I go about sourcing and creating sound effects for Skein.

Saving The Day

Saving The Day

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In any game, you need to be able to store information away for retrieval later, but what information should you be saving? Where to save it to? Local...

Eye Candy And Easter Eggs

Eye Candy And Easter Eggs

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This news post is about how I approached some of the effects (other than lighting) in Skein, as well as how (and why) I created hidden "easter eggs" in...

UI, UX And All That Jazz

UI, UX And All That Jazz

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The user interface and the user experience is one of the most important aspects of any game. If a game isn't pleasant to use right from the start, players...

The Tools Of the Trade

The Tools Of the Trade

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I thought I'd take a slight break from the Dev Diary format, and spend a bit of time talking about what tools I use to make my games (other than GameMaker...

Enemy At The Gates

Enemy At The Gates

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Skain still had no more than one type of enemy so it was time to fix that and start to expand the beasts and monsters that the player was going to have...

Caves Aren't Square!

Caves Aren't Square!

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After my crisis which changed radically the direction of Skein, it was time to start programming some more of the core engine... Which meant adding special...

Mid Game Crisis

Mid Game Crisis

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All devs have a period where they start to wonder whether their project is going in the right direction, and Skein was no different. In this article I...

Let There Be Light

Let There Be Light

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In this article I talk about how I created my own lighting engine for Skein after trying out a few of those available from the GameMaker: Marketplace...

They Live!

They Live!

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In this news post I talk about the "dumb" AI in Skein, why I chose the method I chose (FSM), and what is actually going on behind the scenes.

Moving On

Moving On

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Getting the player controls just right can be a tricky thing indeed, and today we'll explore some of the design decisions taken for creating and implementing...

A View To A Kill

A View To A Kill

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Today I discuss the design decisions (and a bit of the code) related to how the views and GUI were set up for Skein.

Bringing The Game to Life

Bringing The Game to Life

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In this news post I'll be discussing the use of my procedural generation scripts to actually create a maze, as well as how I designed some of the graphics...

Organising Chaos

Organising Chaos

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In this post I explore the various ways that I could procedurally generate levels in Skein - particularly the use of Binary Trees.

Mummy Where Do Games Come From?

Mummy Where Do Games Come From?

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Where do games come from? It all starts with an idea, often taken from another source, which is then built on. Find out where the idea for Skein came...

Taking The plunge

Taking The plunge

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So, I decided to take the plunge and publish to IndieDB!