For the past three years I've been doing a twin-stick shooter called Sektori by myself (with my brother doing the soundtrack) and I thought I'd drop a note here too finally. Sektori started as a mini sequel to my earlier tiny twin-stick called Trigonarium. I made that really fast (like 3 months for first version) and was never super happy about it, so I wanted to finally to do it properly. It was supposed to take like 6-9 months maybe, but things escalated a bit...
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjJHO4RIWhc
With Sektori I wanted to create a game where runs are pretty dynamic so the game isn't about memorization, but about facing dynamic challenges while still being learnable. Every attack wave and level is hand built and placed, but they are combined and randomized so that your runs don't hopefully get stale. I also spent (too much) time making the bosses randomizable too, there's internal randomization and there's different difficulty variations of them too so I can randomize the boss order. And of course a an extra special stage if the boss happens to come last in a run. Then there's a gradius-like upgrade system combined with a roguelite inspired secondary upgrade system to bring some variety too. This seems like a lot (and is), but to counter that I've tried to keep the weapon systems super simple and straight forward. Only one ship type with blaster, missiles and a strike attack. That's it. Also you only get one life, you get hit and it's done (you can purchase shields though, which allow for one hit and thus act as kind of extra lives). Get caught in a level change though, and even shields won't help you.
The aestethics of the game are inspired by techno music. Fast, detailed, colorful, saturated, intense, aggressive.
So this is Sektori! The development is going slowly but steadily (I've been keeping a devlog on Twitter from the beginning if anyone is interested). If there's any interested here, I could write things here too? The campaing is pretty feature complete, only final final final secret epic boss (?) missing. And some things I don't like I might end up drasticly changing of course... and then a million things to fine tune. Next I'm going to focus on 'challenge modes', as in modes outside of the basic campaign. I hope to get the game done before the end of 2024, but I wouldn't be too surprised to see it slip past that. Hopefully not though, as it's been a while!
Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2105620/Sektori/
Basic gameplay (player has a few drones there and a bonus wave is incoming (the golden enemies flying on a path).
Beginning of the game
Rainbow mode (triggere when the player collects full 'SEKTORI' word)
View of one of the bosses from the editor (Unity)
