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 Solomon's Key remake (Includes playable DEMO)

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immortalx

Guest
EDIT: This is now finished! I've made a new thread in the "Made with GameMaker" section:
https://forum.yoyogames.com/index.php?threads/solomons-key-classic-arcade-remake.55322/

Hi everyone, John here.
At little too late, at 44 yrs old, I finally decided to write a game :D
While I've written my first line of code on a Spectrum +2 in '87 or so, I'm still a noob, as I've never took the time to learn proper programming and all I did was fiddling with various programming languages and game engines over the years, for brief periods of time.
This time I eliminated the most difficult task : Deciding what to do! So I figured what's better than remaking a classic game, keep focused on programming the thing and not worry about over-ambitious ideas. I'm a newcomer to GM and this project has helped tremendously to learn the IDE and gml.

My goal is remaking this game as close as possible, without worrying about the little details.
I started by ripping the graphics from the arcade game. It was a tedious task as I copied the sprites frame by frame, before knowing about the image strip feature.
The mechanics are almost finished. They need some fine-tuning and fixing some bugs in the crouched position. The scripted sequences for level-start, level-end, etc are there in a crude form and they need some fine-tuning too. I also completed a couple of enemy AI (there's still at least a dozen to do!).

There's still left tons to do before starting creating the levels, like score/lives tracking, collectable items, sound & music, menu screen, etc.

 

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I

immortalx

Guest
Thanks @melerski

I made some progress today. Fixed some bugs, implemented collectable items which give score points and lives/score is now tracked.

EDIT: You can download the demo on the first post.
 
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immortalx

Guest
Here's some more progress. Thanks to THE man @matharoo , what took me 2 days to figure out, it took him 5 minutes to explain to me at discord! It took me 1 more day to implement it (I'm really slow) but I finally can move on.
For those who know the original game, you can shoot fireballs at enemies. But their movement is quite tricky, as they tend to "stick" around the adjacent blocks, trying to get back to the player. While I made it a tad differently from his suggestion, it was his idea that had me think properly. I can't thank you enough man!

Also fixed a ton of other stuff and it's now time to start making some levels. When I get some of them finished I'll upload a new demo.
 
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immortalx

Guest
Just added a few more enemies. These are introduced at the third level of the game, which is already quite difficult!


I also got in contact with the original developer of the game Mr Michitaka Tsuruta, to express my appreciation to him and inform him that I'm re-creating Solomon's Key as a hobby project. I was very happy to see that he actually made a tweet about that! He's such a humble and down to earth man and talking to a childhood hero of mine put a big smile on my face :)
 
Amon

Amon

Member
Oh man. I remember playing this in the arcades. First time I ever played this was at an arcade in Cyprus when I was around 8-10 years old. Man, that was a long time ago. Still, this was a very challenging and great game. Congratz on the remake. It looks fab and will have a play when it's completely finished.
 
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immortalx

Guest
Thanks for the nice words @Amon ! The game is on the difficult side for sure.
I will be updating the exe as soon as I finish a couple of levels at a time.
 
I

immortalx

Guest
Just uploaded a new demo with the first 18 levels. Check the first post.
I haven't tested all levels and the timings are probably off compared to the original. But these can easily be tuned later, as I've made extensive use of the object variables feature.
This is indeed a godsend for these types of games where there need be slight variations of object properties between levels.
I already spotted many bugs which are in my list to fix. If you play the demo and find anything I'd appreciate if you let me know.
 
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