The Machine City

The Machine City, or just "Machine City", is the working title of an indie game. Yet to be released, of course.

Although this is intended mostly as a kind of "diary" to arrange my thoughts on the matter, feel free to post commentary and replies.

Here are the recent posts I've made on my other blog which apply to Machine City:

Comments on the genre.

Quick comments on the scripting system being used.

In very brief overview:

The Machine City is a steampunk game in which you play a pilot exploring the vast underground complex known as "The Machine". It's a shmup and can be played either as a standard level-after-level shmup or as a more plot-heavy game with interactive cut scenes. Either way, instead of offering in-level upgrades, the game allows you to equip your ship with upgrades (and a gunner) in-between levels.

The game runs on an engine I've built using Torque 2D (which I heartily recommend). In addition to allowing me to rapidly develop content without the need to carefully place and script every tidbit, it also controls the flow of the game based on which preferences the player seems to have. Functionally, this means if you keep equipping your ship with heavy weapons, your inventor will tend to provide you with more heavy weapons - and if you keep preferring one character, that character's plot will influence the game more heavily.

This engine is a primitive "PAC" engine, but PAC has little place on this blog. You can go over to my other blog to learn about that.

Here are some early (read: "ugly") screen shots:

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