Lyntheria

Back in about 2005 during my very early days of tinkering with game development I put together a puzzle game called Lyntheria. It was the first complete game I wrote, using DirectX 8 and knowledge acquired during my Computer Science undergrad degree.

It was very rough around the edges and unpolished. At the time I thought fixing the resolution to 800 x 600 was perfectly fine, and I hadn't yet encountered the concept of making the gameplay frame-rate independent. And so... the original game is pretty much completely unplayable now.

Often you'll have a grand idea for a game, but upon execution you find it's not as fun as you imagined. Lyntheria wasn't like that. With Lyntheria, when I shared it with my friends I found that it sucked them in.

Getting people to pay attention to a game you've made is often difficult, but with Lyntheria people seemed to take it as a personal challenge, even sharing it with wifes and girlfriends.

Looking back I decided to see what it would be like if I re-created it with my current level of knowledge and experience. This was during 2017.

I really loved the result. It's a simple game (though some of the puzzles are mind-boggling at times, even to me, the creator of them). It was pretty much complete as of late 2017, though I never ended up releasing it because I wasn't sure if there is even a market for these kinds of games nowadays.

Often when I work on a game I'll have a period of intense involvement and focus, but I'll burn myself out on it (especially since I'm doing it outside of normal work hours). I tend to jump onto other new projects and then forget about my previous projects.

In retrospect I decided it's wasteful to spend some much time on a game without at least attempting to make a go of it, so I've decided to resurrect the project and try release it on Steam.

It has a puzzle editor (the same editor I used to create the puzzles). I've tried to make it user-friendly so that players can create their own puzzles and even upload them for their friends or other players to try. The process is pretty simple (one-click really). The main difficulty I faced was preventing unsolvable puzzles from being uploaded. I solved this by requiring the player to play and solve their own puzzle before allowing them to upload it.

There is a single bug remaining where very occasionally reversing gravity in some puzzles doesn't allow the puzzle-matching logic to execute correctly. In addition to that I added an additional campaign at the end without creating new puzzles for it (feature creep!). But on the whole it's very polished and the closest I currently have to something ready for release.

I'm thinking I should probably put my more glamorous and overly ambitious current pet projects on hold and focus on releasing games again. Anyway, enough rambling. Here are the remaining screenshots.

Araxxis Squadron Alpha Completed

I've completed the alpha build of Araxxis Squadron and plan on uploading it to get some feedback soon. Here are some screenshots...

Araxxis Squadron

My real-time strategy Zyrtuul was probably my favourite project. However, over time I came to realize that the scope of it was too large and that, as a result, it was unlikely to ever reach completion. So I decided to cut my losses and put it on hold indefinitely.

Out of the ashes rose a new, simpler game, Araxxis Squadron. I had put in so much work on Zyrtuul, and didn't want to let all of that time and effort go to waste. So I salvaged the game and decided to convert it into something new.

This new game is called Araxxis Squadron -- Into Legend. It has the feel of an old-school arcade space shooter, but there are also strategic elements, in that you have to penetrate the enemy's base to destroy their outpost core. So it feels like what you'd get if you took the old Asteroids or Space Invaders games, and added in strategy elements.