Killer Snow

So over the Christmas Holiday I decided to take up a project that I'd dropped long ago.  Well, at least try to get back into Game Maker, which I'd said long ago was actually to painful for me to work with.  Turns out, Brent was right.  Just using straight code rather than using drag and drop made the experience a whole lot better.  For anyone who knows me, I'm not that much of a coder.  It boggles me, and I don't feel like I can organize it properly.  I'm a very visual person, and visual designer as well.  If I can organize it by sight, I'm comfortable.  Anyhow, the project.

Killer Snow was meant to be just a top down alien shooter.  It didn't start out as Killer Snow, that only happened once it was quite obvious that the creatures I was creating in pixel art originally, were looking like snow flakes.  So, the title was named while handing it to a friend and laughing about my pixel art.  I feel like, to some degree, that I've digressed into the era of Atari with my work here.  But I'm happy with it.

This game isn't great, but it's the first one I've tried to make.  It's becoming apparent how important a simple design document with simple ideas for GUI interfaces and what objects I might need, would be handy.  I had a simple paragraph or two saying what I wanted, but things have exploded a little.  Now, I've got a set of mobs I intend to use and I'm finally just building the content.  The only heavy work needed are a few more of the bosses, and perhaps some power ups that I wanted to add but haven't gotten around to yet.

Simply put, what's the game about?  Currently the style is a lot like megaman, where the player will get to choose from 4 levels to play through.  There's a 5th, but they can't access it until they've done the 4 levels first.  At the end of each level is a boss which killing him will give the player access to destroying specific cubes in the other levels.  Later, as they're not implemented, these will work like Mario, where the player will get a special power up from the cube when they destroy it.

Once the player has completed all four levels, they'll have access to the final stage where they can take on the UBER SNOWFLAKE!  Whatever that is, when I get to it...

If anyone wants to give it a try, just get a hold of me and I'll give you the link to the drop box file.  I'm unsure of drop box's rules for using them as a practical host for online files, so I don't want to post a link here publicly.