Last week on the Unprofessional “Fridogs” show, Drew revealed “Giant Bomb Jammers” a Giant Bomb themed and windjammers inspired fan game created by myself (Isaiah Kelly) and featuring the amazing artwork of Supernormal Step and music of Midnight Brown (feat. Jeff Gerstmann).
Watching the duders play something I actually made was both amazing and terrifying. To see Jeff Gerstmann examining your baby is nerve racking to say the least. However, everyone -besides Jeff- seemed to be overly impressed with it, which I suspect had something to do with alcohol, but in any case the whole thing went off better than I could have ever expected. It was a great honor and I felt extremely privileged to have played a small part in last week's awesome show. Thanks Duders!
Where can I get this?
Unfortunately, the game is not currently available for download. The version shown on UPF was a pre-alpha build that I feel needs more work before releasing it into the wild. I do, however, plan on getting an updated public release out as soon as possible, so I can start gathering feedback. I've already gained a lot of very helpful input just from watching the duders play it on UPF.
The Back story.
The origins of this project can be traced back several years to when I first began to experiment with pixel art of the Giant Bomb crew. The end results were better than expected and this inspired me to try other things. I've been dabbling in game development for many years now with not much to show for it, but I'd always thought a Giant Bomb themed game would be really cool. Naturally, this led me to the idea of a Giant Bomb themed Bomberman clone, but after working on it for about a week I lost interest. Probably because I'm not a huge Bomberman fan.
A few years after that in late 2012 I decided to try making a dual-joystick shooter named “Gerztron” that built upon my original pixel art style. Food Fight influenced the design quite a bit; I liked the fact that the characters in Food Fight always faced you, and their legs simply flipped from left to right depending on their movement. This meant you didn't need to create sprites for every direction! I made a ton of progress and learned a lot of cool techniques on the project, but ultimately it had to be put on hold indefinitely.
Then came the news of Ryan Davis's death in 2013. This made me really want to do something for Giant Bomb and the community. Something that would celebrate our community and perhaps, honor Ryan's memory too. I also thought this would be an excellent chance to leverage some of my unused assets. After the rise of Windjammers I decided that this would be the perfect kind of game to build using what I already had. I technically started work on Giant Bomb Jammers on Christmas Day 2013, but work continued on it sporadically between other things, so progress was very slow.
When the news hit that Vinny would be moving to New York, I realized that the duders might never have a good opportunity to try out this game together after he left. So I worked frantically to get it into a fully playable state before the going-away pizza party, but unfortunately, I just didn't have enough time. But this did help propel the project forward, and a few weeks ago I finally got it to a state that I was happy enough with to show off. I thought it would be a fun idea to reveal the game on Unprofessional Fridays. So I emailed Drew the latest build and was pleasantly surprised to see it played on last week's episode.
What's next?
I've decided to port the game from GameMaker to Unity, primarily as a learning exercise. But this is no simple task so the next update is going to take a bit longer than usual. I'll be putting out a public build for everyone to try soon after. I'm also going to try and make a development blog post every week on its status to keep everyone informed. So stay tuned.
Thanks for reading!
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