Venom Event Attempt #3

We've tried a few times, made some great progress, and had our attention get diverted elsewhere. The Venom Event has been a long time dream for the Final Parsec team. In fact, it was the game that originally brought us together. The beginning concept is simple... a 2D space themed platformer. We started making this game back in 2013 using PyGame.

We were new to game development, and the project was ultimately too ambitious for us. We wanted multiplayer networking, complex single player campaigns, and various different modes for players to engage in battle. We were also starting to realize PyGame was a poor choice of engine for us. We had much stronger experience with C# (from our careers) and engines like Unity had a much better community to lean on for learning. We shelved the game and decided to try a simpler game to learn Unity. A couple of years and a couple of games later, we decided to revisit it. We never got far with this one...

We ended up getting distracted again. This time, it was robots and attempting to refine our tower defense games for a little monetization.

Here we are now again ready to take another swing at it. In this latest attempting, we've hopefully got the experience to make it happen. We've also decided we're not going to push much for making money like we have in our previous games. This one is just for fun. The idea is to start simple, incrementally make it better, and release frequently for free here on our website.

We'll usually try to post here on the blog or make a video summing up what's new each time we publish a new version.

Here's what we have for our initial release (20180924.3):

- A Lunar Pioneer that players can control with WASD to move and SPACE to jump. The player has a running animation when he moves and he'll face the direction of the players mouse.
- A slightly automated build process to create the Web GL version of the game and stick it into this website for y'all to play.
- An unsophisticated camera that just follows the player around.
- Some stabs at a few basic platform types:
    - Static platforms
    - Elevator platform that shoots the player dangerously and recklessly high into the air
    - Moving platforms that slide back and forth
- Initial work to support pickups for the player. Proof of concept with a coin, but these will ultimately end up being guns, ammo, health boosts, etc.

Part of this release includes a new running animation for our main character. Setting up these types of animations can be pretty straightforward once you make a sprite sheet. Here's an example of sprite sheet that you can generate when you pack all of your art into a single image.