LogiGun: A History

It’s a bit surreal, but now that a year or so spent working in seclusion has resulted in what I hope to be a working videogame, I find myself forced to write a post that somehow provides some context of its existence. Well, here goes nothing.

I first started making games back in elementary school using a program called GameMaker. They were exactly the basic, ill-fated fangames everyone creates when they first start out.

Sidescrolling platformers starring EarthBound characters:

Sidescrolling shooters starring Mario enemies with guns:

Metroid-style adventure games starring more Mario enemies, with more guns:

And then something happened. The year was 2007, and perhaps as an indicator that I had finally molted free of my Nintendo fanboy phase, I took a break from giving assault weapons to Koopa Troopas and made a game based on my own ideas. This game was Logi-Gun:

I could go into more detail, but if you’re really curious, you can just download the game for free from the extras page. Logi-Gun was the last game I ever finished in GameMaker. This was because that year, I headed off to University to get a fancy Computer Science degree, and found that I no longer had the time nor the resolve to work on games any longer.

A lot happened in the following four years. I learned real, big-boy programming languages like C++ and Java. I got to use that knowledge over an intense three-month span coding a game from scratch in a small team for a games programming course. And I also discovered a love of character writing from starting up my own webcomic.

All that time, my gamedev itch was growing. Making games was something I loved doing, and I missed it dearly. I wanted to build my own engine, using all of the techniques and practices I had learned. I wanted to design and write characters and share them with players. I wanted to take a wild shot to see if indie game development could be a full-time job. So when I graduated, I decided it was now or never.

At this time, I looked back at Logi-Gun. I still regard it fondly, as it represents a significant turning-point for me creatively, but after four years of hindsight and maturation of my design sensibilities, I found the game itself to be… flawed. Deeply, deeply flawed. I’ll likely get into particulars in a later post. Despite that, the basic gameplay concept still really appealed to me. There was merit there, it just needed to be done right.

So I did that. I took Logi-Gun and everything I’d learned, and started from scratch. And well, here we are.

Hopefully this time, I did it justice.