Time Warp - Vaznolen
This will be the first of a new series of blog posts entitled "Time Warp", featuring old projects of mine from well before I started my studies. I recently discovered just how many abandoned projects and experiments I had, after digging through an old backup with a decade worth of nostalgic data. I'll begin with my very first game, Vaznolen. I believe I was around 13 turning 14 at the time, venturing into the world of game development. Vaznolen was written for the Horizontal Shooter with BOSS competition on shmup-dev.com and took around a week to make from scratch, despite having longer I left things until the last minute as usual in my naive youth.
It's hard for me to recall everything about the development of the game, but I know that the original source files are in an old archive that I hope I'll be able to find someday. I do remember drawing inspiration from the games R-Type and a lesser known title, Intensity XS ReCharge as shown below. The game was developed using Game Maker with all programming in GML and art having been done myself, with only audio being outsourced. An interesting fact is that the art is all ray traced, not in real-time of course. But rather for sprites, I took my models and rendered them using POV-Ray for use in game.
I do recall spending ample amounts of time on the shmup-dev IRC channel during development, picking up knowledge from fellow devs with far more experience than I at the time. The one who went on to win the contest told me that I should really learn about vectors, a concept that seemed evil to me at the time. I may do a follow up post in the future if I manage to find the original files, for an even deeper insight into my thought processes from 9 years ago. For now, I've managed to find a link to an update of the game that should run on Vista onwards, sadly there are numerous bugs and quite a few crashes that seem to occur on newer systems.
Download Vaznolen here.
It's hard for me to recall everything about the development of the game, but I know that the original source files are in an old archive that I hope I'll be able to find someday. I do remember drawing inspiration from the games R-Type and a lesser known title, Intensity XS ReCharge as shown below. The game was developed using Game Maker with all programming in GML and art having been done myself, with only audio being outsourced. An interesting fact is that the art is all ray traced, not in real-time of course. But rather for sprites, I took my models and rendered them using POV-Ray for use in game.
I do recall spending ample amounts of time on the shmup-dev IRC channel during development, picking up knowledge from fellow devs with far more experience than I at the time. The one who went on to win the contest told me that I should really learn about vectors, a concept that seemed evil to me at the time. I may do a follow up post in the future if I manage to find the original files, for an even deeper insight into my thought processes from 9 years ago. For now, I've managed to find a link to an update of the game that should run on Vista onwards, sadly there are numerous bugs and quite a few crashes that seem to occur on newer systems.
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