9-To-Finity

A chaotic management pixel-art game built on GameMaker where you balance managing your screen space and making sure you don't lose your job as the Demon King's lackey.

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Inspiration

I was initially going to make a game based on generating new, self-resizing windows that would act as viewports to the game, but accidentally made it infinitely generate pop-ups. Also inspired by meta games such as There Is No Game, and chaos-games such as Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes.

What it does

You're placed in front of a pixelated OS simulation where you're meant to watch (and destroy!) incoming enemies, but pop-ups disrupt you from doing so. The pop-ups aren't that simple, either -- some of them require access to some files on the simulated desktop, are irremovable, and move out of your way.

How we built it

The game was built on GameMaker Studio 2, with a lot of the artwork for the sprites being taken from online projects available on itch.io. I focused on building the framework of the game (making sure it worked), but in the end I think it's the visuals that make 9-To-Finity stand out.

Challenges we ran into

GameMaker was crashing a lot, and one of the major issues I had was figuring out how to simulate the OS so that it looked nice, was functional and also realistic.

There were also a lot of ants crawling around my room.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I was able to incorporate a lot of my own artwork into the game, although this costed a lot of time and effort on my part since I'd only been studying pixel art for about 2 weeks or so. Something else that was nice is getting the game-loop actually working, and making the sound design sound (haha) put together.

What we learned

Making games is hard. It's not just the programming, but the art, sound design, game design and making all of those cohesive enough to be a game. It's definitely one of the more satisfying parts to get right though.

What's next for 9-To-Finity

I actually have a list of bug fixes and updates that I'd like to make for the game, since I found both the development and playtesting had potential: 1.) save-and-load system 2.) better window interactions (minimize, fullscreen, etc.) 3.) adding meta progression with shop upgrades 4.) adding a tower-defense aspect with buildable defense systems 5.) more classes of enemies -- airborne, ranged, etc. 6.) more pop-up types: i) "Ransomware" -- charges you X coins to remove the pop-up ii) "Webcam" -- not sure if this is ethical, but is an unremovable pixelated ver. of your webcam iii) "Login" -- requires you to search through text files in the simulated desktop to find your password iv) "Deadline" -- requires you to type X characters to avoid a fail state / game-over v) boss-specific announcements -- the current announcement pop-up isn't specific (although it's pretty cool and I like the vibe, I didn't like that I spent 30 minutes doing that alone) 7.) wave announcements and more screen clutter to induce user panic

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