Hi, everyone! Leandro here, working in A LOT of things to get Beyond the Storm ready in the next month! In this 4-part series I'm gonna show some aspects from the very first beginning of the development of Beyond the Storm!
The levels in Beyond the Storm are being made in Tiled Map Editor. But, when we started, Tiled didn't had a tool to export the maps to Game Maker Studio 2. So, for this, I've made my own "Tiled Map Editor export tool to GMS2", which is available today in this link:
With this tool, I could do the maps in Tiled Map Editor and export them to Game Maker Studio 2 easily. With this, I've made a few tests, and even recreated the first level of Tyrian on it, screenshooting the whole level and remaking it tile by tile.
And, here's a peek of the first level in Beyond the Storm, the Sector A of Tarwen Station. Fun fact: I've been using Game Maker since it's version 4.2, when it was just "Made by Mark Overmars". I was age 13 at that time, and didn't had any knowledge of the internet back then. I was able to have my MSN and my Orkut profile only two years later, and that's when I've started to help other Game Maker developers here on Brazil. A few years later, and somehow they've put me in charge of the official Game Maker community on Orkut.
Game Maker changed so much, if compared to the newest version. And I've seen every version , upgrading my licenses, and kept training and teaching on the engine. Now, with almost 20 years of experience on it, I'm ready to launch my first commercial game, with this project which is already reaching 1000 objects (and beyond!).
I've already said here but, Beyond the Storm isn't the first iteration of a "Tyrian remake", making "Supreme Tyrian" circa 2007 that - fortunately! - didn't saw the light of the day!
I've made a lot of other projects that remains sleeping in the depths of my files. Maybe someday I'll upload some of them (the playables, at least!)
Back to Beyond the Storm, the first game mechanic made was the most iconic detail of Tyrian: The energy system. So, I asked "can I have more than one bar?"... And then I've created the Power Cells system, that allows weapons to upgrade midflight:
You can notice that I've managed to maintain the HUD in the style of Tyrian. Since the beginning, we're already started prototyping the HUD, with only one thing scrapped from it (which was also the same thing scrapped from the Tyrian prototypes: The "cockpit")
The whole purpose of the Power Cells was functioning, but I needed to make possible to do changes in the "energy matrix" in-flight. So, I thought to do a "bullet-time" approach while making those changes. This is somehow related to how I imagine they do in Star Trek, when they're redirecting power to some system: ,
And, speaking of Star Trek... This week I was designing some ships that are based on the ships available for the player, and it got a "mirror dimension" kind of feeling...
I must confess that, in a universe so diverse like in Beyond The Storm, it would be and heresy to think that the player is the only one capable to buy these ships. There's shops everywhere and money everywhere! SHIPS FOR EVERYONE!
Some of these ships you can notice that has a more "polygonal" approach... That's not a choice of the art director (which is me!). It's the lack of skills in Blender, although I like the final result (after a few touches here and there):
Not every asset is made in Blender, only the ones that needs some rotation/animation, to make those animations a lot faster and nicer, withoutthe distortions that simple painting can do.
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It's been a wild week, doing a lot of things everyday, using every hour available to make progress. The to-do list only grows and grows, while I'm trying to test it and fix things.
I must admit that I never was a guy of "big numbers", but I'm impressed on how this project got attention in the last days, and I'm happy that I've managed to get here, with God's help! "Thus far the LORD has helped us."
And, don't forget to wishlist Beyond the Storm! We're already on 450 wishlists!