Info

Released: Cancelled

Genre: Arcade

Created by: Shattered Journal Games

Role: Programmer

Engine: GameMaker

Team Size: 3

Description

Play as a robot and fend off waves of enemies trying to tear you apart. You only start on one piece of terrain, but using your trusty magnet, you can spawn more terrain to increase your moving space. Survive wave after wave, and survive the longest!

Thoughts

Originally made for Ludum Dare 38 on April 25th 2017, I worked on it as a side project for about a year on and off. It became a prototype playground, where I made a bunch of wacky enemy types. For example, there’s an artist enemy type that will start drawing a skull. When it finishes the drawing, you instantly die. There are ghosts, beetles, eels, floating teeth, the game’s theming was kinda all over the place. The game was also super tough.

After putting it in a competition against other games and not getting past the first round, I had a turning point in my game dev career. Magnetic Terrain was in a state where it needed a lot more time and work to be a good game. I decided I’d rather work on something new then fix it up, so I cancelled it and 3 other personal projects I was working on. It was a difficult choice, but I felt like I’d improve more if I started on new projects rather than continuing my older projects. Sometimes in your dev career, it’s not about the game you’re working on now and if it will do well, it’s about the game you’re working on after that, and what you can learn now to help you later.