Subterranean is a game about mining. Your goal is to simply dig as deep as you can and find valuable ores. You have limited durability on your pickaxe, fuel in your lantern, and space in your backpack, which you can upgrade by spending your earnings. The game is procedurally generated as you descend, with a different level every time you restart.

It’s reminiscent of a lot of games I’ve played where mining is a big part of the gameplay. There’s just something about mining in video games that’s satisfying, enough that there’s plenty of games about mining specifically. Maybe it’s because finding rare treasures is fun, or maybe it’s thanks to Minecraft for those of us who’ve been playing it for years. It inspired me to try my hand at making a completely randomly generated game about mining.

Subterranean is available to play on Newgrounds, Itch.io, Game Jolt, and my website. I also put together a team of beta testers to find bugs and give feedback before releasing it, so thanks to them there’s hopefully less bugs than there would have been otherwise.

There’s no way I’ll be able to properly articulate my thoughts about the state of this game. It’s enormous and very, very difficult to make, and it’s fun to play, but also very, very buggy. I was hoping to at least be almost done by now, but I was too busy with college (mainly calculus and making Spaceblast), and now I’m much farther behind than I already was.

Besides fixing bugs and overall quality improvements, the major tasks I have left are as follows:

• I have a few more songs I need to write
• I have to finish the sprite for an absolutely massive dragon boss (which was in hindsight a terrible idea because of how much time and effort it requires to make)
• I have to make the final boss, both it’s animations and gameplay mechanics
• I have to make the ending cutscene

The driving force that prevents me from abandoning this game is fueled by how far I’ve already come with it and how much I care about it. But this game is almost two years old by now, and it’s holding me back from everything else I want to make. There’s no way I’ll finish it in any reasonable amount of time, and there’s no way I’ll give up because I’ve worked too damn hard on it, and yet there’s no way I’ll be able to fix it up to the standards I have for it.

So what am I going to do?

I’m putting this game on hold. I’ll see if I can finish the tasks above whenever I can, and then I’ll release the game as an open beta. I’ll maintain a list of known bugs so everyone knows what they’re getting themselves into, and try to fix what I can. But this game may never be officially released, and there’s no telling when I’ll get the beta version out.

I think this is the best option I have because I want people to see this game and it’s story. I want feedback on what I’ve done well and what I need to do better in the next game I make. But I also want to be able to do other projects and develop new skills. Making games is the most difficult thing I’ve ever done and likely will ever do, and I love it, but I want to be better at it.

I’m really sorry this is how things ended up. I do my best to be productive, write devlogs and give updates on things, and just be a competent game developer, but my ambitions are too far beyond my capabilities. I won’t stop pursuing any of the bigger projects I have in mind (some of which dwarf even this game), but right now I can only make small games with more subtle stories. I hope you all will enjoy them when they’re released, and I hope I can one day be good enough at making games to start one of those big projects.

Spaceblast 1.0 is now available to play on Newgrounds, Itch.io, Game Jolt, and my own website. It’s an arcade shooter about flying a spaceship, shooting down other spaceships, and seeing all sorts of cool space things like planets, stars, and nebulas.

Additionally, you can now support me if you like what I do by donating on Itch.io or paying whatever you want on Game Jolt. Making video games for a living is a huge aspiration of mine, and donating any amount whatsoever is immensely appreciated. It shows that you like my work enough to help me keep doing it.

You can listen to the soundtrack here on Newgrounds or on Youtube. I think I’ve gotten a lot better at making music over the past couple years, so if you want to hear a song without interference from laser blasts and explosions, go check them out.

You already know what to do. It is your duty as a space explorer. Report any and all bugs.

This past weekend I did a sort of soft launch/beta release for Spaceblast during Oz-Con as part of the digital student showcase, and I set the game to early access so anyone attending the con could play it. So the game is there, and I think I’ll leave it as early access because it won’t be long before the game is finished.

I was originally going to set it back to a private build until I finished it, but I somehow ended up on Game Jolt’s hot page and that made me rethink my plan a little. The game is stable, and all that’s left to do is make some more content to add, so I don’t want to say, “Nope, can’t play it anymore.” and take it down for a couple weeks without any reason for it.

So if you want an early look at the game, it’s on Game Jolt and Itch.io. I’ll hold off on a Newgrounds release until it’s done. You can also check out the trailer if you haven’t already.

Spaceblast will be released soon on Itch.io, Newgrounds, and Game Jolt.

Game Page: https://sites.google.com/view/thelunarlighthouse/arcade/spaceblast

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Immanent_Death

For the past couple of semesters, I’ve been working on a game in all of my game development classes for assignments and as my final project. It’s called Spaceblast, and it will be released at the end of this semester.

This will be the first game I’ve made after actually learning how to make games professionally (unless you count Err, which was for a 4-day-long game jam). Spaceblast is an arcade game inspired by the old Namco arcade games like Galaga and Xevious, where you pilot a spaceship across the universe and battle alien invaders.

I’ll give more updates on Twitter and Game Jolt about the game’s progress. Usually I release games abruptly without talking about them first because I never know how long it will take before it’s finished *gestures to fantasy game*, but this time I have a defined timeframe to complete Spaceblast because it’s my final. So hopefully it’s not a broken mess by the end of the semester.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably wondering what on earth is going on in this game I just released, and more importantly, if it’s even possible to “beat” it. The answer is yes, though it won’t be as easy as simply finding an exit and walking out of the forest.

Your biggest concern is the thing that stalks you in the darkness. You might have noticed that your footsteps aren’t the only footsteps you’ll hear. Sometimes there are slower footsteps that grow louder as they get closer, and when this happens you might consider going the other way. If this thing catches you, your game will end.

With that in mind, your first objective is to find map pieces, which are scattered around the forest. They all combine to form a complete map of the maze, and each piece also has a tree marked on it which corresponds to an outlying tree in the maze, helpful for determining your location.

As you gather map pieces, you might also notice that a lot of paths seem to go off the page and continue on the other side. The maze has no exit. It loops back on itself in all directions, with no way out.

In order to escape, you’ll need to find all the map pieces. The last one will have a marked tree that is scratched out, and that is your next destination. When you get to the tree, touch it. Then you’ll need to go to the outlying tree in the center of the map. It isn’t marked on the map, but it has two bushes on either side of it (as seen in the above picture). Touch this tree, and then you can escape.

I hope this game provides a good challenge or a couple good spooks. It was interesting to try and make a game in four days. I wanted to make something really small and simple so I could try to balance it’s mechanics in time for the jam deadline. It’s still pretty hard, but that’s fine with me.

On another note, I’m still working on that fantasy game. There’s not that much left to finish in comparison to what I’ve already finished, but there’s still some pretty big tasks left to do, like bosses, music, and the ending, and I want to take my time with it and make sure I get it right. I’ve actually got another game that I’ve been making for college as my assignments/final project, and I’m not sure what state of completion my fantasy game will be in by the time I release that one, so things might get a little confusing. But by the end of the year I will have released three games in a year as opposed to my current record of one.

One year ago on this date, I stated that I was making another game. Now it’s a year later and it still isn’t done, so that’ll tell you how good I am at making games. I have no idea how long I had thought this game would take to make when I first started it, but I don’t think it was over a year. So if any of you out there were looking forward to playing it, I’m sorry it’s taking so long. Allow me to explain why.

Remember when I said this game was chaotic? Such an understatement can hardly be rivalled. That’s because, in addition to being more story-focused, this is also a game about fighting in battles with soldiers and monsters. The original idea was to have two giant armies fight each other in some kind of battle simulator game, with you playing as a wizard that can heal the soldiers on your side, keeping them alive and winning the battle. Soldiers and monsters alike would use an AI to seek each other out and engage in combat, where they would roll damage values to deal to their target based on stats for the attacker. There were several soldiers and monsters of different types, all duking it out in a big warzone.

But there were so many problems with this idea. There’s no way a web game would function correctly with all this stuff going on, not without lagging or breaking somehow. With several actors on and off-screen, calculating target distances and damage values, it was just too much. And that also impacted the gameplay experience, because I slowly realized that I had no idea how to make the game fun and playable out of such madness. There was far more chaos than I had intended, and despite this, it just wasn’t very interesting.

So I ended up reworking everything. Now, your party consists of ten people, and in battle you’ll only ever be in combat with that many monsters, bringing the maximum number of combatants down to twenty characters at a time. Also, damage is no longer rolled or based on a character’s stats. Instead, damage is dealt based on collision, and if an attack hits a target, the target takes one point of damage. With these big changes, lots of other aspects of the game needed adjusting as well, like the max health of actor types and the size of battle scenes.

This new combat system works a lot better, but it still needs lots of adjusting before it’s finished. I need to carefully refine it, not just to fix as many bugs as I can, but to make the game fun, playable, and balanced. And with it’s running theme of pure chaos built into both it’s story and mechanics, you can bet it won’t be nearly as hard as my other games, because there’s no way I’ll be able to fix every bug that exists.

That’s the reason why I didn’t want to say much about the game before. I had no idea what I was doing with it at the time. But now I’ve made a lot of progress since figuring that out, though I still have a lot of work to do before it’s done. My personal goal that I’ve set for myself is to release it before the end of the school year, and that still seems feasible, but I still can’t promise that it’ll be out by then. In hindsight it was definitely not a good idea to start making a game like this after having only made one other game, but that doesn’t mean I’ll give up on it. One day it will be done, and when it is I hope you’ll enjoy it.