I've decided to take another chance in making a Neostriker game. I've had a concept for a tactical game for a few years, by few, I mean perhaps 14 years. Yes, the game concept greatly predates Shining as it's based off a board game I designed to allow my friends and me to play Neostriker when we could not play outside. The concept has evolved, but the base is the same.
Part of what took so long was the search for a game engine. The most popular ones for Indies seem to be Unity and Unreal engine. However, I found programming a 2D tactical game for them to be too difficult for my level of experience. I took a look at RPG maker, but it looked too tedious and would require a lot of heavy customization. Things changed though when I heard the news of Nintendo Switch supporting Gamemaker Studio. I read reviews on Steam of the engine and saw some saying the community support was strong. I then opened YouTube and found Sergeant Indie's tutorial series. While my game will still require a lot of changes, the base he presented was what I needed to get started.
That being said, I have a few intentions for how I want to design this game.
1) Be easily replayable.
2) Keep grinding to a minimum.
3) Allow for player freedom and customization
4) Hide a few secrets
5) Allow for enjoyment of discovering mechanics
At the moment, I do not expect to have great graphics and music as my budget is pretty low and I'm already spending a bit with little prospect of getting a return. I'll try my best at providing what I can, but my hope is that the gameplay will be good enough to obtain funding to polish up, add multiplayer, and support consoles.
There is certainly a lot of work ahead of me, but I look forward it. Creating, when you have the right tools, is fun and so is the result. I hope you will enjoy the result of my work.
Dream on,
J. D. Nyle
P.s. if you are interested in learning about turn-based strategy and an intro into GameMaker Studio, I highly recommend Sergeant Indie's series. If you just want to learn about pathfinding, he has a video on that in the series https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFAuv8mcArkU5QeQv6qec5BKbZYdaWBjb
