Hello readers, my name is Jihun, but you can call me CheesiMoon. I’ve been doing game development since high school around 2016, and Astropods: Starside Glaze is gonna be my first ever commercial game release!
Astropods: Starside Glaze is a 2D Fighting Platformer that’s about molding your limitless potential to bring back the Waterfall of Dreams! Featuring knockback-based combat, a badge upgrade system, and freeform mobility, just about anything’s possible.
I’m the main dev for this game, doing everything but the SFX and music, which is handled by Breadbinbran. This game has been in development for over 5 years by now, going through many revisions over that time, including a name change. This game is the result of said 5+ years of development, and I think it stands strong as a result of its well-developed foundation.
I first started learning game development back in high school because I simply wanted to make games that I would play and love. I’m a huge fan of action-oriented platformers, so I wanted to make one myself! Some of my favorite games are Kirby Super Star, Mega Man X and Super Smash Bros Melee, so I wanted to make something in that vein, although at the time, I wasn’t aware of why I loved them so much.
This game’s fundamental idea since day 1 was an action platformer featuring a powerful character with potent abilities gated by a resource meter. That has never changed, but everything else around it did. Knockback, badges, even another character, they all felt pretty natural to include since they increased play variety, and that is another one of its main pillars.
All this to say, it’s just fun to control an innately powerful character, one with loads of potential waiting to be tapped into by the players, and me as the dev giving players tools to tap their potential into the characters they control.
Development has lasted for quite a while, and it was relatively turbulent in the earlier years as I tried to work with other programmers, as I hated programming back then. However, when I realized that this game would never be made unless I stepped into the trenches of development, I then took everything back into my hands, and built it up once again.
As a result, development has been slow, but steady since then, and I couldn’t be any happier. Since then, I’ve also enlisted the help of a composer since sound was the one skill I didn’t have a satisfactory amount of, and we’ve been at this game for the past year and a half-ish. It’s been good working with him.
I’m using GameMaker Studio 2. Since I didn’t have a programming background, I wanted an engine that was easier to learn and had a good community, and found GameMaker to suit my needs.
The 2 big hurdles for me have been learning to program and market the game. I begged for help on the GameMaker discord help channels so many times they probably got sick of me, but thanks to them (if you were one of them, thank you so much!) and Youtube, I was able to start making things. I still struggle with it every now and then, but a focused scope help reduce those frustrations, and sometimes you just gotta accept the jank.
Marketing is now my current most recent hurdle; it feels really hard to reach out to the people who would love this game. I’m confident there are many potential people out there, but there’s a lot to marketing that I don’t quite understand yet. This isn’t just about how to get eyes on the game, but also how I should sell this game to the people. I don’t have a good answer for that yet, but I feel the answer is becoming just a bit more clear every time I put the game out there.
Just start it, and have some fun! There’s no such thing as a complete waste of time here. You’ll learn so much by experiencing it first hand. Maybe you overscoped and feel stuck, or maybe your code turned out to be really bad in the long term. That’s alright! It’s all a part of the learning process; that experience is very valuable to take with you. If any interesting idea hits you, try it out and see how it is! Even if it’s a complete bust, that’s something new you learned, so you still win here.
Thanks for reading, and thanks for having me here! I hope that there are more games like mine coming out soon, I can’t be the only one to find this fighting platformer thing interesting! It’s still a vastly underexplored space here.
-CheesiMoon
Astropods: Starside Glaze Demo on Steam
❤️
