Development Update & Stuff

I thought I'd put this out here to give a general idea of MTR's development.

If you are just interested in where this process stands now, head on down to the "Where It Is" section.

The number one limiter on how fast this gets developed is time. In a perfect world, I could drop everything to work on this all the time, but sadly this is not the case. The team making this is two people- myself (Thundermagnet) and my close friend bindernews. That being said, I generally only go to his coding mastery if I am in quite a pickle. (So actual development the vast majority of the time is really all me).

Where It Has Been

Pressing to this point has been one of the harder things to do in my life. It has taken months upon months of hard work, time, and effort. Unsurprisingly, coding a full fledged game mostly by yourself is NOT EASY. Making matters worse, I never sat down originally thinking "I want to release this on Steam", so MTR was originally not even designed with this in mind. There have been two major refactors, countless bugs, months of implementation work, and of course, weeks of coding burnout, where I could not even look at the game source code without getting a headache. MTR interestingly started as a little project for my mom. She mentioned how much she loved an old game called "Mine Trap"- and after hunting it down on an outdated computer we had (it only works on Windows 2000 as far as I can tell), I learned enough of the game to rebuild it for her to enjoy once again. The early stages of MTR had no flashy menu, no high scores, not even arcade mode. The game would start and instantly go to what is now labelled as Classic Mode, you'd go through about 15 levels, and then it would just... end. The bugs were catastrophic, the graphics were drawn by me and at 4x lower resolution as to what it is now, and there was still no intention of releasing the game. MTR stayed at this state for about 4 years. I had no intention of fixing it or the like, because it was just a side project, forgotten on my computer. However, one day I ran it, played it, and was disappointed in myself. Obviously, I could have done better! So I did the first round of "bug fixes", which ended up being me implementing more broken features than anything else. I once again dropped the project, because I still did not care all that much about it. There was nothing personal to me about the game. Then... the dreaded COVID hit. My job essentially had everyone not come to work for three months- but as a contracted worker, I still got paid. What did I do with this free time? Well, the first two months were exhausting everything in my Steam library. Only once I got to the point of total boredom with every game (and an overwhelming want to actually accomplish something I could be proud of in life) did I decide to tinker again with MTR. But this time, I kept going. I started dumping hours and hours of each day into working on this. The main menu and classic mode really took shape during this time, and I ironed out hundreds of bugs. Then I decided I wanted to scale the game up. All sprites at this point were 32x32, and it looked rather bad. Okay, very bad.