I officially declare "Monolith" a success! Since it has now been played by at least 2 people, up from my last game (Press Space, if you want to download that, PM me and I might put it up somewhere again) which - as best as I can tell - was played by only one.

Thanks to Game Maker Studio going free for a bit, (and Blender Game Engine being a real SoB to work with) now I'm working on another - significantly more ambitious than Monolith - top-down, 2D game that I've got some ideas for that I'm really excited about.

This game is going to:

• Take place in a large open area that may or may not be space.
• Feature pseudo-random encounters, as well as scripted events.
• Be an absolutely fucking immense open world.

Space is cliche. Thus I feel like it might be a better idea to make my open world something along the lines of an alternate dimension where the laws of physics aren't quite the same as ours or a micro-dimension where everything is on the scale of subatomic particles. Anything really to be able to exchange umpteen screens of scrolling starfields for some more interesting visuals.

As you traverse, you get pseudo-random encounters. I say pseudo because they spawn randomly, but you can still see them coming from some distance and avoid them if you want. Rather than the typical RPG trope of the encounters being a variety of local enemies that gradually increase in difficulty, I plan on making the encounters a variety of different styles of game play. Some will indeed be combat, others might be a short race, or a death-trap filled maze or a puzzle to be solved. The types and difficulty of encounters will depend on the region you are in.

Speaking of the region you are in, I'm working on a coordinate system tens of millions of pixels wide and long. Or hundreds of trillions of pixels square (well, all pixels are square...) At the current speed the player is able to move, it will literally take 24 hours straight to traverse from end to end.

So far I have made:

• A parallax scrolling background
• Some nifty "weather" effects
• A pretty cool player sprite modelled in 3D in Blender that I take stills of to make 2D sprites that have some wicked particles spitting out the back while you move.

Obviously there's a looooong way to go. Short of everything, specifically In need of work are:

• Story - Does it have a traditional one? Or is it just an near-infinite explorer with random shit happening? Both? I have some basic thematic ideas brewing, but nothing super specific just yet.
• World building - Obviously, I can't have the same background scrolling along for the entire thing (which I briefly considered: a sort of test of patience, art game where you do nothing but hold right for a day of play time. I know someone would finish it.) Those hundreds of trillions of square pixels need to be broken up into regions and themed to not put everyone to sleep. Possibly even downsized to make it less of a slog. But, but, my huge open world!
• Encounter design - Both scripted and random encounters need to be designed, drawn, programmed, balanced, the list goes on...

If any of this sounds like fun, download MONOLITH for now and let me know what you think for encouragement. If this game gets as big as I hope it does, I'm going to have my work cut out for me.