Demo The Adventures of Sullivan

  • Thread starter bumpercarstudios
  • Start date
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bumpercarstudios

Guest
Hi everyone,

My brother and I have been working on "The Adventures of Sullivan" for over a year now, and thus have created our own development company of sorts. Whether or not we make any money doing this, we have found a passion in game development and will be releasing games to the world as Bumper Car Studios.

The Adventures of Sullivan is a 2D, side scroller shoot'em up inspired by games like Metal Slug, Mega Man, and Contra.

Set in a science fiction world, you play as Sullivan, a famous, and now retired bounty hunter known for moon walking while fighting, and defying gravity with fancy double jumps and air slides. Sullivan is forced to pick up his weaponry once more as his loyal companion and best friend, Claude Arthur Thatchmoore (C.A.T. for short) is stolen by the feared and evil cyborg pirate bats!

Here is a trailer:

Here is some game play:

The Adventures of Sullivan consists of 7 levels, with 18 usable weapons, environmental hazards, boss battles, and over 60 completely unique enemies with their own attributes, guns and bullet patterns. While it is best played with mouse and keyboard, using a game pad will be fully supported. A single play through will take anywhere from 2 to 3 hours.

We both have other jobs, have never coded before, and this is our first time using Game Maker. However it has always been a dream of ours to create games and experiences similar to the ones we have very much been influenced by.

Thanks for taking the time to check out our project! We will hopefully be releasing in May/June for $5 on Steam, with plans to release on three other digital platforms.

Find us at https://www.bumpercarstudios.io
 

Yrbiax

Member
Hey, i tried your demo.

I liked difficulty overall, but snipers were kinda brutal sometimes.
You could add ability to swap to default weapon. (If i want to preserve ammo or need more range)
 
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bumpercarstudios

Guest
Hey, i tried your demo.

I liked difficulty overall, but snipers were kinda brutal sometimes.
You could add ability to swap to default weapon. (If i want to preserve ammo or need more range)
Thanks for checking it out! I appreciate the feedback.

Maybe the sniper bullets are a little too fast =)

We've been thinking about adding a 'drop gun' feature or something like switching back to your handgun. We're trying to be careful not to overload the player with controls, and we definitely don't want an inventory system etc. as we want to keep an arcade game feel.

Our drop system is set up so you will most likely find another gun before running out of ammo. Also forcing you to use a wide range of weapons and therefore the player must adjust their tactics based on what's dropping.
 

CMAllen

Member
Thanks for checking it out! I appreciate the feedback.

Maybe the sniper bullets are a little too fast =)

We've been thinking about adding a 'drop gun' feature or something like switching back to your handgun. We're trying to be careful not to overload the player with controls, and we definitely don't want an inventory system etc. as we want to keep an arcade game feel.

Our drop system is set up so you will most likely find another gun before running out of ammo. Also forcing you to use a wide range of weapons and therefore the player must adjust their tactics based on what's dropping.
An alternative to reducing the bullet speed is to give snipers a multi-phase shooting mechanic. The first phase is the aiming phase, where it shows a red laser line to indicate where the sniper is aiming. In the second phase, the sniper locks in, stops actively tracking, and the laser flashes to indicate an incoming shot. And then the shooter fires, with a brief delay afterward before returning to the aiming phase again. It keeps the danger of those shots but gives the player an ample amount of warning and time to evade.
 
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bumpercarstudios

Guest
An alternative to reducing the bullet speed is to give snipers a multi-phase shooting mechanic. The first phase is the aiming phase, where it shows a red laser line to indicate where the sniper is aiming. In the second phase, the sniper locks in, stops actively tracking, and the laser flashes to indicate an incoming shot. And then the shooter fires, with a brief delay afterward before returning to the aiming phase again. It keeps the danger of those shots but gives the player an ample amount of warning and time to evade.
We have something like this in later levels, it's certainly a nice mechanic to have. We wanted the first level to be pretty straightforward, so there's no environmental hazards, the bullet patterns are mostly predictable, level design has less choices and consequences etc.

Later on, enemies have more health and will have different and harder bullet patterns to avoid, levels have traps and pits to fall into, there will be objects that react to the players proximity, bosses etc. Otherwise we stuck with pretty simple mechanics for the first level so the player can get acclimated to the general game play and difficulty level.
 
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bumpercarstudios

Guest
Based on feedback from members of the itch.io community, gamejolt, reddit and game maker forums, we've already changed and added a lot to The Adventures of Sullivan!

We have redesigned some of our levels, added drop gun / change gun controls, adjusted our health drop code, improved our gamepad support and control layout, improved enemy AI, reworked some of the gun mechanics, adjusted some of our scripts, fine tuned some collision masks, enhanced certain particle effects and created brand new ones, and added checkpoints to each level. All the while squashing bugs that we've found through testing, and from people playing our demo. Feedback from the indie community is extremely important to us, we are all ears!

If you haven't grabbed a copy of the demo yet, find it at itch.io: https://bumpercarstudios.itch.io/the-adventures-of-sullivan

We would love to hear any and all feedback towards what could make The Adventures of Sullivan more entertaining and enticing to play. Let us know what you think! Please note, the above changes have been made to the main build of the game, and aren't reflected in the demo.

We also added some new support tiers to our Kickstarter for people who feel extra generous. There are only 25 days left! Check it out at: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2117172813/the-adventures-of-sullivan

In other news, we are currently working on our boss battles, for which there are 6 total. Every boss battle will be unique and challenging in a way that is totally different in every encounter. We're super excited to show everyone, but we still have a lot of work to do before the game is playable from start to finish. After finalizing the boss battles we will be working on story elements, cut scenes, dialogue, a lot more sound effects, and then we'll be revisiting and wrapping up the soundtrack and implementing it fully into the game.
 
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gamedev4life

Guest
nice work. howd did approach the zooming in and out w pixel with the distortions?
 
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bumpercarstudios

Guest
nice work. howd did approach the zooming in and out w pixel with the distortions?
The only zooming we really have is in the trailer, and that was actually done with a video editing program. So we didn't have to worry about distorting the pixels!

We do however have a few spots where the camera "zooms" in and focuses on a particular spot for a moment, but is a quick cut, and snaps to the position. In that case, we just had to choose the proper view dimensions to use in our code, based on our original numbers for the room settings so it scaled correctly and appeared to have zoomed in or magnified in a way.
 
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bumpercarstudios

Guest
Spoiler alert!

Check out our first boss encounter we've been working on:

Our first few boss battles will be more simplistic than ones later in the game. Instead of having several attack phases and state machines, we are creating a hectic battle based on having a busy, bullet-hell like room.

We have quite the variety of bosses throughout the game, both living and machine. Excited to show everyone down the line!
 

rIKmAN

Member
Whether or not we make any money doing this, we have found a passion in game development and will be releasing games to the world as Bumper Car Studios.
This is a great outlook to have with regards to game dev, and doing it for the love of doing it will always result in a better end product than doing it for monetary gain as the motivating factor.

Good luck with your game!
 

Toque

Member
Looks pretty good.
I like your name. Bumper cars.
The lost cat sets a good tone to the game.

The walk animation seems a bit stiff but I’m watching from a small screen. Maybe drop the vertical a pixel open stride. Not sure I would have to watch on my computer. Walking animations are generally unforgiving. Sometimes I do a 8-12 frames. Running 4-6.

But good stuff!!!
 
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bumpercarstudios

Guest
I really like your cutscene system. It looks very professional, well done!
Thanks!

This is a great outlook to have with regards to game dev, and doing it for the love of doing it will always result in a better end product than doing it for monetary gain as the motivating factor.

Good luck with your game!
Right on! While we aren't in it for the money, we are running a Kickstarter, but it was mostly for the free advertising. We've had more video plays and exposure there than many of our paid advertising campaigns.

Looks pretty good.
I like your name. Bumper cars.
The lost cat sets a good tone to the game.

The walk animation seems a bit stiff but I’m watching from a small screen. Maybe drop the vertical a pixel open stride. Not sure I would have to watch on my computer. Walking animations are generally unforgiving. Sometimes I do a 8-12 frames. Running 4-6.

But good stuff!!!
Appreciate the feedback! Animations were some of the most challenging things for us to accomplish. Only one of us has experience drawing and illustrating, but neither of us have ever animated or worked in pixel art in general. Sullivan's moon walking animation came out better than his running one for some reason. It's almost noticeable throughout the game that we slowly started to get better at animating, as some of the enemies towards the end of the game have more complicated, and smoother movements. We have yet to really go through and polish anything though, so I'll add that to the list!
 
Last edited by a moderator:
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bumpercarstudios

Guest
There's less than 24 hours on our Kickstarter!

It doesn't look like we will make our funding goal, but that won't stop us from continuing work on The Adventures of Sullivan.

We're thrilled with all the feedback, messages and support we've received thus far.

We will continue updating this thread with game news and updates regarding our development.

Thanks everyone!
 
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Red Phantom

Guest
This looks really good, I can tell you two have put in a lot of love and effort into it. Will try it out soon and let you know how it goes.
 
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bumpercarstudios

Guest
Hi everyone,

We are getting ready to release The Adventures of Sullivan!

Right now we are polishing everything up, getting our music and sound effects integrated, hunting down bugs and errors that effect game play and the overall experience, and improving anything we find that is lacking in general.

If you haven't already checked out the demo, it's over at itch.io !

We're super proud of what we've accomplished at under 2 years for pretty much beginner coders. After some analytics, we have over 1,030,000 characters in 46,000 lines of code! Having done everything ourselves it's extremely gratifying to have a finished product we're happy with. Coding, artwork, music, story and overall design all done between two people!

Game Maker Studio 2 has been a joy to use, and it's amazing that we have resources like this available to us. We've always dreamed of curating our own experiences through an interactive medium like video games, and we're grateful yoyo games has provided the software to do so.

Please look out for The Adventures of Sullivan on Steam for $5 very soon! We don't want to be hasty and release something unsatisfying and full of errors, as Shigeru Miyamoto said (creator of Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda and Donkey Kong) "A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad."

It looks like by the end of July our game will be officially done and for sale on the Steam platform. We'll also be looking into releasing on itch, humble and GOG. However we know that's not where it ends! We'll be supporting, improving and fixing any problems or issues players find with the initial release, and the versions/updates we push in the future.

We'd love and appreciate if you checked out the demo, and/or grab our game on Steam. If anyone has any questions or comments on game development we would be happy to talk.

Thanks for reading, and happy coding!
 
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bumpercarstudios

Guest
The Adventures of Sullivan launches August 16th!

Check out the store page here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1124430/The_Adventures_of_Sullivan/

We had a couple slight delays in development and wrapping up the final product, but it will be officially for sale the afternoon of August 16th, a Friday.

We'll make another post the day of release. We hope the yoyo games forum community will check it out!
 
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