I started project Sahaquiel perhaps half a year ago with the intent of making a clean, short and dirty game to expand my portfolio, but since then, the game's evolved into something much, much bigger. This was primarily due to my experience with Hideo Kojima's work on zone of the enders, I finished the game less than a month into Sahaquiel's development cycle. His work on Zone of the Enders had a look and feel like nothing else out there, being an avid creator of all sorts of things, I took that as a challenge :P.
So Sahaquiel changed from a game where you were a tiny ship with a giant melee cannon that smashed into enemies into a full-blown game-play concept with a story on a huge scale. It wasn't long before things started resolving on how I wanted to handle this newly proposed project, how I wanted things to look, how I could make the gameplay as odd, yet simple as possible, I had found my time-sink that would last me a long while.
Some months later, I hade developed a nicely comprehensive physics engine, at that point it was downright bogged down with bugs, but it was a ball to mess with (read: throwing mechs into other mechs and watching them bounce about in delightfully correct ways.) The lovely thing about the throwing physics was I could use a simple "massactor" variable to define the movability of an object, meaning a tiny flying drone could be kicked around like a playground ball, but an assault carrier would be about as movable as a mack truck with its brakes on.
I had also developed the swinging system, which was fun since it allows you to rev up a good spin with your ship and smack things hard in the face with any old hunk of metal lying about the playfield, the fun thing is they would also fly off paralell with the spin velocity so you really felt the umph involved with the action, much to the elation of my classmates who were having a go at the time.
Some time afterwards I had a nice catalog of enemies, each with differently configured intelligences, some programmed smart, others dull as a rock as I felt was fitting to their frame. One nice example is the gunship, a mean little automated frame that makes up for its lack of size with its clever use of its many weapons, they could evade, circle while sputtering away at the player with their sizable rear turret, or dive into battle while their fellow gunships held a back line and harassed the player. Sometime around then was when I made the tech demo trailer, quite a few months back.
I soon started developing the first level as a prototype, progress proved slow at this point as I didn't feel the look and gameplay were meeting my standards, that changed rather quick as I came up with plans for the first boss that would be waiting for you at the end of the fourth stage. He's a barrel of fun, and I'm sure people will love how alive his machinery is; giant turrets spew fourth plasma beam death, then spout steam from their muzzles as they re-cycle to fire again. Hydraulics whirr as launch bays slowly slide open, then catapult fighters from their depths, point defense guns spin up and unleash gigantic volleys of muzzle flash and ballistic firepower and spew fourth storms of shells.
Recently, I went ahead and developed the menu infrastructure, which was nicely modular and easy to program once I set up my own structuring for menu options. Another thing that's different about this game is the menu, suffice to say it's not a simple vertical setup like most people are used to. Not to mention my "test group" once again was egging me to start a campaign that didn't yet exist they were so impressed and ready to see the game run tip to tail.
The next entry is going to talk about my adventures with story development and my random inspiration for the haunting music that will play through the intro. For now, here's a shot of a great cradle of humanity, roasted alive by the mysterious drone armies of the Exiles, back from isolation to tell humanity of the end they saw fit for the universe. This is all in respect to the story of course.
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