About
My goals for this project were to continue familiarising myself with scripting in GMS2, and to make something inspired by my favourite game, Oddworld: Abe’s Exoddus. I often reference Abe’s Exoddus as a superbly designed game as every aspect of it from the audio to the visuals, the narrative and the gameplay, all work together to create an immersive and coherent experience, something which I believe every game should strive for.
I spent a long time scripting the player character and creating the visuals in Aseprite, slowly forming the first level into a finished prototype. For the level’s art, I opted to create it without using a tileset, which is something that greatly contributed to Abe’s Exoddus’s memorable levels.
A first for me was making my own audio. I used Bosca Ceoil to create a simple music loop. I have no illusions that finding music elsewhere would have made for a better fit, mainly as making music is something I find very challenging, but knowing that every single aspect of the project was important to me.
I originally recorded a gameplay video with just the first level, but felt it needed more to get the idea across so I spent a couple of days to make a second level. Looking back I think the second level needed a more work, but regardless I’m proud of the outcome.
This has been the most enjoyable project to date, I am always tempted to come back to it and add more levels and enemies, but the priority for me is to keep moving on to more small-scope projects and keep building skills. I have no doubt that I will one day return to this project with much more experience and be able to give it the attention it deserves.
Narrative
I quite liked the narrative idea which was also very reminiscent of the Oddworld series. The gist of it is that you play as a robot that lives in a world inspired by cassette futurism, but one day these big, mean, greasy, diesel powered robots show up with a giant factory machine and swallow everything up. You then have to find a way to rescue other robots, destroy the machine and escape.
