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Me and Brad made this game for the 2014 Indie Game Maker Contest we had the month of June to make the game from start to finish. Our idea was to make a game where you had to micro manage the various systems in the body. These’s included the cardio respiratory system (lungs), pulmonary system (heart), digestive system (stomach), and immune system (spine). Through out the game the state of each system is constantly being depleted and you need to switch between them constantly to ensure the system doesn’t fail.

There was a time difference misunderstanding and we found out just in time so we abruptly turned in our game without it really being finished. I posted a link to find the game, and if you try it out you’ll quickly notice there are several terrible issues with it including extremely fast system failure and a music loop issue. Aside from the early submission the game still had a lot of problems. In a continuous game like this with so many balancing variables it very tricky to make a reasonable difficulty curve. The immune system in partiuclar was not setup well for the style of the game.

We did learn a lot from the experience. This was the the first project we saw through to completion (sort of) and we learned a lot about what worked and what didn’t in terms of working in a team. Another new thing was that all the visuals were made using vector art instead of raster art. This meant we didn’t have the same scaling issues that were present in Preying Mantis. We even took extra advantage of it by having a lot of zooming in the game.

I was a good excersize for me to learn how to use vector art in Game Maker Studio. Another new thing was that the entire game only used a single room, so I had to add a lot of code for managing which view you were currenly in as well as what needed to be enabled in that view. Making the view pan a lot made the game seem really dynamic and I’m really happy with how that turned out.