Toxik Games blog part 1: And so it begins

~~Hey my name is David-Alexandre Lapierre. The only developper of Toxik Games yay! After playing indie games throughout the last couple years, I realised that it seemed like a really nice job and asked myself, why wouldn’t I give it a shot?

And so my journey began, maybe 5 to 6 months ago while I was working at an airport. Since I had a lot of free time I started searching  on the web on how to make a video games. As some of you might expect, I didn’t find anything that was really useful because there was so many information at once that I didn’t know where to begin with. I saw a post about finding a good engine and Gamemaker came up, I knew I had looked it up back in 2008 or something like that without ever realizing what is was ment for beside making some sprites. After about a month of working with Gamemaker I got my hand on the programming language and could start working on a project alone without the need of refering to videos or forum posts. And so my first try at making an indie game was born, Attack on Generator. It was a tower defense game with a sort platformer style. Anyway it was really weird. I couldn't figure out how to make good AI so the enemies were basicly walking always in the same direction unless they were hitting a well, then they would change direction. I know I'm a pro at designing mechanics. By the end of that project I knew a lot more things on how to program with Gamemaker and so I tried to make a sort of hack’n slash style game with randomly generated dungeons, imagine Diablo 3 rift system. That failed horribly. After putting over 20 hours of developing time on the game I realized it was going no where. I was having a hard time with bosses and AI and couldn’t really get a hand on the inventory system. It was working but really poorly so I gave up on programming for a while. Lesson of the day. Don't try to make a project that is too big for you to work alone. Even if it is in 2D, it's going to take you a lot of time to figure out how to do everything yourself. Two months after abandonning the project, something really nice happened. Gamaker on was humble bundle.

Humble bundle added Gamemaker pro along with the android export for 12$. A whole lot of new ideas came to my mind and wanted to develop games again. After a few weeks of searching for the perfect idea, I came up with Geometric Flight. An easy to understand fast paste arcade game that would be played on mobile phones. After a week, the first prototype was done but I felt like something was missing as it was always the same dull gameplay and wanted to add something new. At first the game was supposed to be space themed but I realized how bad I was at pixel art. I then came up with the idea of geometric shapes. I tried to make some cool looking backgrounds but none of them really seemed good enough. I then proceded to make the background black and add some explosion particles when colliding with objects and I felt like the game was more alive. Then came the idea to add more obstacles that had different actions. The game started to get together really well and realized how addictive it could be after playing three hours straight without realizing how long I had been playing for.

So here I am now, about to release the first beta of Geometric Flight with some bug fixing left to do. I tried to test the game on my friend’s phone today and everything seemed alright. There are only some minor touch ups left to do. Although the game is currently only avaible on android phones, I’m considering to start a kickstarter to get some funds to buy the IOS export lisence.

I will try to release a new blog every week for you guys to follow what is happening with the developpement and where Toxik Games is heading.