Giant Robot Mechs

The game is done! It’s out, and you can play it.

There are giant mechs. There are intergalactic ninja space ants. There’s a whole town where everything is destructible.

There are also long loading times, sorry!

It’s been a learning experience for me making a game again after all these years.

I’ve only entered a game jam once before, about 15-20 years ago I entered a retro remake competition using a BASIC language and got runner up. But then the world happened and the gaming scene just passed me by, I got old, I forgot about writing games, I forgot about 3D.

I’m basically a granny without the kids.

But then I redescovered games. Three years ago I was running an RPG convention and needed a way to give out prizes, so I wrote a little gladiator game. Two years later I was still doing updates for it; but then the community was starting to drift away and it was time to end that project. I’ve been tinkering with new ideas since then, trying things out but not really committing to anything, and then somebody I spoke to online mentioned the GitHub Game Jam.

I registered my interest, but then the theme was announced and it didn’t inspire me. “Bugs”. I decided not to enter.

Two weeks passed.

And then I thought. Hang on…. Giant Robot Mechs vs Intergalactic Ninja Space Ant! There was still two weeks left until the deadline! I could make a mech game!

I still have things on my to do list, stuff I wanted to add but never had time for: The outer wall of the town I wanted to be a graphic equaliser bouncing in time with the music, I wanted shadows, but when the last weekend came about I hadn’t put any gameplay in!

I had done a 3D engine on a worker thread, I had done fluid dynamic path finding, I had made a lighting engine that ran 1000 simultaneous realtime lights. But I didn’t have a game, and had just 2 days left!

Originally it was going to be an RTS, but I found it a lot more fun driving the mechs directly so I changed course at the last moment. You can still access a split screen view to control four mechs at once; although honestly talk about sensory overload - its too much to take in and I can’t keep up with it in that mode! (but then, I am very old).

I learned a lot. Mostly about itch. On my last day of development (the Sunday before deadline) I descovered that Itch has a limit of 1000 files and a maximum filesize of 1gb. This was not something I had considered… I had to set up a web server to host assets and I didn’t have the bandwidth so I set up cloud storage infront of it; Itch didn’t support localStorage or sessionStorage, so panicked changes where made.

So yes, there are things that will forever remain on the to do list! But I finished. I did it; I made a game.

And it’s very disco.