Introductory Post

This blog has been set up to chart the development of the indie game that is under development by Brainworm Software, that will be available on PC for anyone with Vista/Win7 and DirectX 10 hardware at some point in the future.  The game currently has a working title of Juggernaut (until I think of something better), and is an action/adventure/RPG/2D shooter hybrid.

Primarily, the game is a 2D 8-way scrolling shooter, where you fly around and blow the hell out a staggeringly large number of enemies.  The engine is designed to efficiently handle several thousand enemies on-screen simultaneously, with a similar number of projectiles, as well as a good number of laser, lightning effects, space-warping and any other interesting effect I can come up with.  The aim is to effectively model large swarms of (intelligent) enemies that need to be cut through in order to progress, as well as less frequent yet more powerful enemies and some crazily large bosses.

Upon showing engine builds to people, their first impression is generally "it's like Asteroids!", which is quite accurate in terms of the basic viewpoint and some of the more rudimentary mechanics of the game.

However, there is also a significant exploration element, and RPG elements are brought in by means of custom upgrades and modifications to the ship that improve your ability to fend off the swarms as you progress in the game.  So, in terms of being a mush together of existing games, the closest description is probably some bastard nephew of Asteroids/Smash TV/Zelda and Metroid.

The game has, technically, been in development already for a year or so in my spare time, but I recently made the decision to leave my current job as a technical consultant in order to work on it full time.  The custom underlying engine (written in C++ and DirectX10) is fully 3D, but is used here to mainly render 2D objects, and strongly exploits the DirectX 10 instancing capabilities for efficient rendering.

The next post will include a number of current screenshots to give more of an idea of the current progress.