I've done a lot of game projects in my time, a vast majority of which never end up seeing the light of day as a demo here on Newgrounds. Heck, every demo I ever have put on here usually end up abandoned as well, since I'm pretty good at going "welp, I made the thing, moving on then!"
So I figure I'm going to be posting some occasional blogs which cover some forgotten projects of mine, talks about them, and what they would have been. I won't really go into why I stopped working on them, since the answer to that question every time is "it stopped keeping my attention before I thought of something else to do instead". One misfortune of having an ADHD riddled mind lol.
Soljourner
The Idea
So, Soljourner. This game was going to be about this:
You play as "Soljourner", a robot that was sent out somewhere to explore planets. You don't know where you came from, what you're doing exactly, or why you're here, but you do know that you and your equally amnesiac artificial intelligence friend have to figure out what's going on, and checking out that weird planet down below is only the first step.
Gameplay
The entire game was made in RPG Maker MV, and used various plugins which allowed the gameplay to be sort of a top-down shooter type of deal. As in, actually, you could really click anywhere on the screen and shoot lasers in that direction live on the map. It was pretty basic and definitely wouldn't have been the most advanced kind of combat you'd ever see in a game on Newgrounds, but it was fun to mess around with nonetheless.
The premise of the game has you approach a planet, scan it, and then drop down to mine for resources and explore caves and such, in order to extract local elements that planet holds. There also would have been an extremely basic way to build structures, but I didn't have a whole lot of use for it gameplay-wise. The thought was that maybe I could have had some form of automation be set up, with drills, conveyor belts, etc, but that was a bit beyond my skill level at the time and likely wouldn't have actually added too terribly much to the game unless I explicitly wanted it to be a factorio-like.
Mining materials wasn't actually just to progress the story however, I did intend to have craftable upgrades and tools you could use to get more places and fight harder foes. Although combat wasn't a main focus of this game, it was going to have the occasional boss fight which I'd have to turn more into like, high-action puzzles, so the combat wouldn't be just tedious "stand here and fire at it and occasionally step to the left or right to dodge".
Graphics & Audio
The graphics were pretty basic, as I started this game not too terribly long after my Taiga Voyage/Mori Story demo, so I was on a kind of NES-inspired kick at the time.
The music style was actually going to be a sort of atmospheric synth kind of style, where there'd be a lot of reverberated sawtooth-waves, spacey sounds, and overall just weird vibes to fit each planet.
I do have a few songs made for the game, though I can't say I'll be uploading them anywhere at the moment. I actually did upload one once, but it was struck down for accidentally having a similar bassline to some other song I never heard of, so I'm not really sure lol.
The Story
So, the funny thing is, there's actually two different attempts at creating this game, each with their own stories. I'll post the other version of this game in a different blog, but for now, the story of this one has to do with you, Soljourner, exploring these planets with your AI buddy to discover yourself.
The game would have had you explore each planet and a few other worlds of our solar system in reverse order, starting with Pluto. You'd go around, mining ice and minerals to scan and identify, when you suddenly come across some abandoned underground bunker. You reactivate it's power to find it's been this way for thousands of years by now, and the security drones in there kick up and attack.
Pluto was the only planet I ended up finishing, but each planet would have this similar theme of dropping down, discovering evidence of things happening, contemplating the meaning of life, and moving on.
As the story develops, you'd learn bits and pieces about yourself, how that you were built by people to explore the cosmos in ways no other robot could, and how somehow, you had been shut down for thousands of years until suddenly waking up and finding yourself in this setting.
By the time you reach Earth, it has automated defense drones that would shoot down your ship unless you can craft special stealth tools from materials gathered from all the other planets (including skipping Earth and going to Venus and Mercury). Once at Earth, you find the entire planet's surface, including even the oceans, is covered in one singular endlessly looping ruins of a metropolis. The entire planet is dead, aside from what remains of robots guarding the planet and mindlessly carrying out their tasks for the long extinct race of humans.
New mission: Find out what the hell happened to everyone.
Unfortunately, that's about as far as I got for writing the plot, but I thought it was pretty fun, and I did enjoy making what I did of the game. Sadly, like every other major project of mine, I just couldn't keep my attention span on it long enough to do anything with, and so it remains as a project file on my computer.
Maybe someday I'll try and revive this story in the form of a new attempt at a game, or perhaps a comic or something.
Conclusion
I have a second version of this project I attempted a few years later, but I'll write about that another time.
In conclusion, I feel like this is one of my more favorite projects I worked on, and I think it would have been pretty fun to post to newgrounds and have people play. Who knows, like I mentioned already, I may someday reuse the story for something, or heck, maybe even take another crack at it.
This is my first time writing one of these article-like blogs, and I'm no journalist, so I don't expect this to be the finest reading experience. Regardless, hope it was something fun to see.
