That moment when you KNOW you are fking up
I spent the day (holyday) researching for art and marketing. I don't know if I should be doing this at the moment, The game is still on early stages, but it seems fun (addictive) enough to spend time on this. Just drawing characters for the pilots and crew... but it seems off.
Only time will tell. I also bought a website on a whim. So I might migrate my data there.
There's already a name for this game: Tri-Strike Squadron or TSS for short.
New features
Today I did new features:
- new enemies
- a long and tortuous rescaling to better adapt the game to the different screen sizes
- unified several configurations to be easier to tinker with.
- health bars for "bigger" enemies
It's been a long day. But I feel good as this looks promising.
Tags: mobile
Another productive day
The grind keeps going!
- Two new special abilites, the barrel roll and the countermeasures. One makes you invulnerable to collisions and bullets, the other makes every homing missile go haywire.
- Homing missiles? Well duh, now special enemies can shoot homing missiles.
- A new kind of enemy that lingers on screen.
- Now you can carousel-revolve your active ships during gameplay.
- Configurable amount of spawners
- Explosions, turrets and lots more!
Tags: mobile
Two Months Later
Development has started on the mobile game. It's about space ships, nothing too fancy. You can change between ships ingame and they all have different firing modes, special abilities and passive abilities.
In two days of coding I got it running with the following features:
- switchable space ships (each one with a different firing mode).
- a special attack which for now is common to both 3 ships.
- dumb enemy (the ones that just try to crash into you)
- shooting enemy (beefier, with a shield)
- special enemy it lingers onscreen shooting at you
- explosions
- score keeping / game over.
Next step is working on the backgrounds to define a kind of "map" and making static enemies (turrets) that shoot homing missiles.
After that, I'll need to do the real special abilities for each ship.
Tags: mobile
Ch-ch-ch-changes
I've been redefining the goals. I want to make games, the ones I like but I need some kind of $$motivation$$ also. So, the new plan is a 3 game cycle:
- 1. A mobile game
- 2. An old style game (see below)
- 3. A game I like
Mobile Games:
Trash cashgrabs with a twist. No, really. Trying a honest mobile gaming game with one rule: Only the player can decide when to watch an add.
Old Style Games:
Games that look like they are from the Atari 2600, or Coleco Vision. Even better if I can match the original pixel size. These ones are for fun and I plan to have a series of them.
Games I like:
Like the one I've been calling just "wizard" before in this blog. They tend to be really challenging and usually end up in the design or prototyping stages. By making two simpler games before the "one I like" I'm priming myself and getting experience as I go. I know myself, thus I know how to cheat myself.
So, what's next? The mobile game. What's it about? Space ships. That's all I can say right now. It's an arcade shooter like 1942, River Raid, etc.
See ya.
Tags: molusco
Work is NOT being done
I was on holidays so I didn't made any progress. I expect to return to work as soon as I catch up with my -actual- job.
I had a few ideas for music and style. I like the cute "Nigel & Marmalade" style, and it's crazy denizens. Also the Pikuniku soundtrack.
Anyways... nothing to see here, move on, move on please.
Tags: wizard
Work is being done
I did some work. Mostly in the game design document, defining the mechanics and the spells. So far there are 50 spells and I don't know if I'll get to implement every one, but so far these three are implemented:
- Telekinesys: target an object and make it fly and move it to another place. Useful to move things around.
- Shrink: reduce yourself to one fifth of your regular size (and your speed). Use it to hide and to pass through small crevices.
- Swoosh: hurl yourself flying in a straight line at high speeds. Maybe useful to cross a chasm or to get away from danger.
Now the un-fun begins. The prototype seems to work and now I need to put some elbow grease on the programming. I need to write a few state machines to make things right. This will take some time. Some boring, boring time.
Tags: wizard
The chosen one
Predictably, the one game I chose as a starter, was the unnamed wizard game. I started prototyping the engine and writing some definitions, including a game design document.
So far, it's nothing more than that: just a prototype using Kenney's 3D assets. The main goal is to test if the core game is fun or not: solve puzzles and don't get killed using magic in a dungeon.
Here's a quick demo:
Tags: wizard
Natural selection
As per my last post, I wrote 31 new game ideas and selected three possible games. Mayble I'll do all three (yeah, sure). Maybe I'll START both three and then dich all three until a new thing comes along.
The selected games are:
- a broody, ambiental, horror game in first person about being stuck in an unknown apartment building. Let's call it building.
- a dark humor job simulator game where the grim reaper works from home. Let's call it reaper.
- a funny physics puzzle game where you are a wizard trapped in a dungeon and your spells let you create and modify your environment. Let's call it wizard.
If I had to choose one of those, It would be wizard. Creative use of the spells to solve the dungeon get me hyped up. I've been thinking about different spells, like "web": you create a web. The web is bouncy so you can jump higher from it. But it's sticky, so enemies walk really slow over it. Also you can use it to climb vertically like a ladder. And if it touches fire, it's engulfed on flames. Or you can use it to block a corridor. The problem with a game like this is I need to tweak a lot of things to get the mechanics / physics right. As a plus, it can work in several ways: FPS, 3rd person view, etc. I was even thinking about a game where the environment is all blocky 3d and the characters are superdeformed 2d sprites with a thick border. It was cool. Might steal.
Next, I would choose reaper. I like dark humor and the whole "kill the guy by suggesting a course of action" also gets me hyped. The main challenge for this game is graphics. While in "wizard" the graphics can be super blocky because the main fun is in the physics / magical system, here the fun must be how the decisions made by the soon-to-be dead people are depicted. Pacman doesn't just dissappears when he dies, y'know. I know there can be lots of fun in this game, but how I depict it is crucial. Cutesy art style? medieval woodblock prints? no, those are reserved for another one. Crude and rudimentary pixel art? I don't know. The best part is I can get to do all the game without any art at all, just menus. See how it goes.
Last, it's building. It's an over-done idea. A cliché. Another backrooms game. The thing is... I worked a LOT with the first 3 Quake games, Half-Life and Counterstrike 1.4 to 1.6 so I'm really proficient with 3D games about a gloomy building in a first person view game. So I know EXACTLY what to do here. Bad thing? How do I get people to be engaged in "just another spooky backrooms game"?
Tags: plans
The first post
Welcome to Molusco Games. I've been making dumb games since 1992. Never succeeded in making a full release, but I keep trying and having fun. I have a few projects in development: a walking simulator, a medieval adventure, a turn based survival game, and so on. Everything is on very early stages of development so there's nothing to show yet.
Currently (August 2025) I'm undergoing a monthly challenge: every day I come up with a new videogame idea and write a few sentences about it. I'm on the 18th day, and when I reach the 31th idea, I'll pick one of those to fully develop as my first official game.
The idea is to pick something simple to test every aspect of game development, from the sketchboard to publishing.