Ludum Dare 27 game jam concluded and Deconstructeam gave birth to a little dungeon puzzler called Dungen Dogan’s Cursed Crew. In this game you play as Dr. Dogan, who along with his men just raid the tomb of an ancient god whose curse fell upon them: just 10 seconds of life left. Luckily, the weak spot of this god is the black amber, and the dungeon is full of them. In order to escape the temple, you’ll have to combine wisely you team skills and manage accurately the 10 seconds of life of each crew member if you expect to making out alive.

You can play it here.

We are pleased with the result, a humble game with a correct duration. However, this time we had other motives beyond the pleasure of making a game in just a weekend: with the Game Maker: Studio license recently acquired (thanks to the funds of our recent crowdfunding campaign), Ludum Dare presented itself as an excellent opportunity to make an intensive training and finally take the leap from ImpactJS to this new game engine.

I had already made my first steps with the free version of Game Maker, but never made and finished a full project, pretty important matter to me. So, since this game engine is going to be my intimate partner during the development of Gods Will Be Watching, I grabbed the documentation, and stepped into making a game in less than 72 hours. The result stands for itself, a proper game, with several flaws, but a game nonetheless. My verdict: highly satisfied with what Game Maker: Studio has to offer and with how it’s going to improve our production power. Even having to learn along the way, the development speed increased notably in comparison with my beloved ImpactJS, not to metion of its huge variety of supported platforms. With few adjustements, Dungen Dogan’s Cursed Crew was working perfectly on browser and Windows.

I don’t know about you, but personally had many prejudices against Game Maker, particularly through the “Make games without programming skills” slogan. Once I tried his drang’n’drop interface and procured to keep myself far away from it. But knowing that Locomalito‘s games or the same Hotline Miami, were developed with this game engine, I finally decided to give Game Maker a chance, taking as guarantee this games which I worship for their high quality. Great surprise since once left behind the point’n’click programming thing, I took a deeper look at this scripting language GML (Game Maker Language) and discovered its high flexibility and the variety of tools and functions at your service which make your life quite easier regarding the most usual practices when developing a game (mostly about the collision handling).

I’ve never programmed with such agility as in Game Maker, and with no doubt Dungen Dogan’s Cursed Crew would have been much harder to create with ImpactJS. I’m happy knowing that Gods Will Be Watching is going to become a highly polished product and, despite the fatigue that brings a game dev marathon of 72 hours, I’m eager for working even more than before.

Tags: Game Maker, Game Maker Studio, post-mortem, postmortem