Hello again! This post is going to be the first in a series of postmortems on my game projects that were never finished. I’ve worked on a good few games that never got finished, and instead of letting the work go to waste I figure it might be fun to showcase what was done and reflect on my time working on them (before I get old and forget it all…)
Today I’m going to be talking about Stimbu 2. I’ve been working on it on and off for a little over two years, and I’ve recently decided to start over from scratch in a new engine. Despite my failure to make an actual game, I learned and grew a lot as a developer over my time working on it.
I created the first Stimbu back in February of 2020. It's a very simple top-down shooter where you play as Stimbu, shooting endlessly spawning robots (based on my friend Stuffling's character) until you've collected 100 thingies. Last year I polished the game and posted it up on Newgrounds. I'll definitely make a post sometime talking about it too, as there's a lot of mildly interesting information to share!
Around June of 2021 I began brainstorming ideas for a sequel to Stimbu. I was brimming with inspiration from games I had been playing like The Binding of Isaac and Doom, and you can see a lot of that in this mock-up screen I drew:
The idea was simple enough. You’re running around levels from a top-down perspective, shooting guys with weapons you find lying around. I decided from the beginning that the main character of the game would be Deen, an Original Character (OC) I had come up with for cartoons that I never ended up making (too ambitious + I don’t really like animating). I really liked all my ideas and went ahead with development, and after a few days I had turned out a prototype!
There were a few problems that led me to dropping this project pretty quickly. First of all, I was very unpracticed in both Game Maker and programming in general. I way over-complicated the player by making her out of 4 layered objects! It was completely unnecessary and came from lack of experience.
Second, I hadn’t really come up with a game, but a bunch of cool things I like from other games that I wanted to put in mine. I wanted explosive barrels and special weapons and lots of ammo types! But I put no thought into how those ideas would work together, or what the game would really be like in motion.
Unfortunately, this mindset would continue through the game’s development…
A few months after giving up on Stimbu 2 I would start on a 2D platformer as well as Bug Toucher (which I finally released on Newgrounds in April). I got stuck on both projects and decided to give Stimbu 2 another try. I made another mockup screen which (vaguely) shows gameplay more similar to the first game.
Breathtaking, I know! I got cracking on getting Deen moving around and kept things much simpler. I had the gun she’s holding orbit around her as a separate sprite (which I was very proud of). I then implemented a simple chasing enemy and some crates to push around, cool!
It was here I got distracted by the first of many difficult mechanics that I would become dead set on implementing. I decided I wanted a Z-axis and floors with multiple heights and spent days on the problem. In this build you can see the Z-axis and jumping. I finally got something that kinda worked but had enough issues that ended up making the mechanic useless.
I continued to do this kind of thing over and over again while working on the game. I would think of something and implement it no matter what. Sometimes those ideas took one night to implement, and it was super satisfying. Sometimes those ideas were way too complicated and wasted weeks of my time. I would think about ways to solve the problem all day at school, write pseudo code in the margins of my papers, and then go home and fail spectacularly. Despite how unproductive I was actually being, I was learning a lot about how to make games.
I worked on the game from February of 2022 all the way to December. By the end I had multiple weapons, rooms of different sizes with transitions, power ups that change how your weapons fire, bounce pads that send you into the sky over enemy’s heads, holes in the ground to fall into, and a cool parallax background! It was only ten months of on and off work, but it felt like an eternity.
The game had bloated from “Stimbu 1 with powerups” to a world spanning adventure where you explore open outdoor areas and dungeons. I streamlined some things, made the game more linear, but in the end, I still couldn’t visualize the moment-to-moment gameplay or how the levels would be laid out. My ambitious ideas were cool, but were not contributing to a good final product, which was my biggest downfall.
In retrospect it seems like I was trying to make my “dream game”, but I think what I need to do for now is make some smaller scale games to get a hang of designing things. Stimbu is such a cruddy game that no matter what I do for a sequel it’ll blow it out of the water! I’m currently finishing up planning and I’m feeling very confident in the direction I’m taking the game. It’s going to be an arcadey twin-stick shooter, and I’ll be posting development logs once I’ve got more to show!
For now, thank you for reading my silly blog. Since you’re so cool, I’ve made up a little care package of crappy old Stimbu 2 builds just for you! They only work on Windows though. If you don’t have Windows, or if you like word scrambles, you can click the other link for some more traditional fun.
Download old Stimbu 2 builds (Windows only)
Download the Stimbu Jr. Fun Pak
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