Project origins

Where does this game come from? The very first version was born, under the same name, in 2014. It was my second project with Game Maker, after a SHMUP I made on the star wars theme. It was over-ambitious compared to my skill set at the time, and the project fell under the weight of it’s badly written code and lack of focus. It stayed dead, for almost three years.

The first protagonist of the game.

For my first commercial project, I was sure of one thing, it was going to be a platformer. I weighted several options, but Lost Fortress was creeping back, out of the abyss. I felt the time was right to try again, knowing all the mistakes I made the first time.  At first, the game featured a male character, and was going to be a long descent in the depths of the world, inspired by Tolkien’s mines of Moria and Jules Verne’s Journey to the center of the earth. With mandatory dinosaurs, goblins, and a lot of other stuff. What the player was going to find ultimately was unclear, but the journey was meant to go deep, into the unknown.

A Goblin.

Funnily enough, the current version of the project as very little to do with Verne’s novel, but find it’s roots in the work of another writer: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. To say more on the matter would spoil the story a bit, so if you haven’t read anything written by Conan Doyle, just know it has nothing to do with Sherlock Holmes.

Dinosaurs and goblins will be missing, in favour of something else, weirder, viscous, primal and highly adaptable…

 

If you want to see more old artworks, find it here on this long-dead thread on pixelation.org.