Have you heard the news? [game dev'ing]

After releasing my 2nd album as vLocity I began pondering what next? I mean, the old truth is that the second album is the hardest for an artist, yet it took me about a week to put together.

Then I remembered an indie game project I started in my old studio. It was coded in VBA (Visual Basic for Applications); an adventure game I did some graphics for. Unfortunately the project files were left on my old PC and I have no access to them.

So I started the coding from scratch. After a day of trying to install VSCode (Visual Studio Code) and Visual Studio Community edition I gave up; VSCode didn't have a debugger for Visual Basic and the Community edition would've taken a whopping 17GB of space which I didn't have on my laptop.

Why Visual Basic (VB) you ask?

I programmed my first game with VB in high school, it was basically a text adventure with some animations called Sauna.

Set in a sauna night where you ponder whether to invite people over and offer them food or beverages, it wasn't much of a hit. My classmates liked it though. It didn't have sound effects or music either as our school computers didn't have speakers or DAW's. It had a bug too and that was a missing line of code that closed the app permanently (if you played it multiple times you'd have to flush background tasks)

So I went to bed and tried to get some sleep, and suddenly I was struck with an idea.

Why not code the game in HTML?

I got up and back on my laptop. After a few hours I got the hang of it and the game engine together. I name both the game and the engine Theia.

Set in a cartesian XY coordinate system, the player must explore a imaginary space with planets and wormholes. There are clues as to where to go next and interaction between encounters and planets in the game which carry the plot onward. I sent it to my brother for some feedback but he hasn't answered yet.

In the current ver 1.0.2 there are 81 quadrants and 7 planets to discover, plus galactic fog tiles blocking the way and a rather simplistic wormhole system. The game takes approximately 3,13Mb HD space.

What I really wanted to do was make the engine 3D so it has x, y and z axis' but for time-saving reasons I left it at 2D. A storyboard in the making-of process would've been nice too but my old faithful whiteboard is too small for such lengthy storylines.

I also did the graphics in GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) and composed the main theme in Ableton Live.

You can download the game from my Dropbox :

Theia v1.0.2 - 3,13MB

Hope you enjoy it!

Feedback is much appreciated.

-ef