Hello everyone,

I want to introduce all of you to a new project of mine called Loadworld. I’ve always had an itch to document the entirety of a game’s development process. Both for fun and my own use, as well as for an end-all tutorial for Game Maker Studio users. If everything goes as planned, I should be simultaneously developing a commercial product for Steam while teaching all of you how to do the same. I want to include my programming strategies, any refactoring that I may do, my design iterations, my approach to level design, and everything in between. This first entry will simply be an introduction to the team, our development environment, and our project.

The Team

I have been asked about this time and time again. It was bound to happen. The Loadworld team is simply myself and Miguelito (@wtfmig). I have been iterating on some design ideas and approaches for the past month or two; somewhat preparing for this blogging experiment. Mig has been doing some early mockups and animations; gathering ideas for the plot and world. I will be responsible for the game mechanics, level design, and code. Mig will be responsible for a lot of the dialogue and plot, as well as all of the assets (art, sfx, etc).

Game Maker Studio 2

I had the pleasure of being part of a very closed beta with a small group of individuals over the past six months or so. We worked closely with YoYo Games, tested their new product, and even had the opportunity of meeting with them in person, making recommendations for future features, and so on. Recently, Game Maker Studio 2 was finally revealed to all of you and is now available to a controlled number of users. Day by day they have been letting more and more people join in.

Currently, the beta allows for access to the “free edition” of GMS2 which limits the number of sprites, scripts, and other assets that you can load into any given project at a time. Thankfully, we have been given the full version and will be able to develop our full project in GMS2 without those limitations. We are grateful to YoYo Games for that and I will also treat this series as an introduction to GMS2 and all of its new features. I have still been using the original GMS for the development of my Spaceboy Games projects (HackyZack, Fara, etc), so this will be a learning experience for me, as well!

Loadworld

Ok, so what is Loadworld? Initially, the goal was to combine item progression and gameplay of your standard Legend of Zelda game with the charm and character of an RPG series like Earthbound or Undertale. Zelda adventures generally have a very bare-bones story and the world is almost identical from game to game. We are taking inspiration from games with a heavier plot like the few mentioned above, as well as cartoons like Adventure Time and Rick & Morty. At times Loadworld will be funny and at times it will be crude. We hope that there will be a little bit of something for everyone.

Design-wise I have been trying to think outside of the repetitive Zelda box, as well. I have been slowly collecting a list of things that I haven’t seen in any of these games. I want to throw a lot of curve balls at the player while still allowing for things to feel familiar. For example, the dungeons in Loadworld have a key item that is used throughout and will be heavily used to defeat the dungeon’s end boss. However, you have no items when you reach Loadworld’s first dungeon. You will have to outsmart your enemies and throw some pots at some faces if you want to survive long enough to grab your first useful item.

What Now?

The plan is to make a blog post like this every Saturday until Loadworld’s completion! We don’t exactly know how long this will take, and honestly, we don’t really care. We want it to be a good game and we only have weekends to work on it. We have some sense of what the scale will be and what the game will look like at completion, but that is bound to change a time or two over the course of development. Our goal right now is to get the prototype up and running, finish designing the first dungeon, and get that demo out to all of you!

We hope that you will enjoy this ride through Loadworld!