Allicorn, lead coder on our current project ‘Basingstoke’, has a solo project which is now out on Steam. It’s rather catchily known as ‘Heckabomb‘.
I’ve worked at Puppygames for about 5 years. Coding and doing audio work for our existing stable of four games, Titan Attacks, Ultratron, Droid Assault and Revenge of the Titans. Puppygames has always been strictly a Java shop but late in 2013 I caught the Unity3D bug (it was kinda going around) and started playing around with its excellent tools in my spare time. By early 2014 I felt I’d learned enough that I needed a reasonably sized project to get involved with in order to learn much more.
At the same time, my girlfriend had been laid up in bed for some weeks due to some health issues. We had an Ouya in the bedroom and she spent day after day tracking down and playing just about every twin-stick shooter on the platform. So, day after day, I’d hear about her experiences with these various Ouya twin-stickers and what was good or bad about each of them. We got to talking about ideas for a twin-stick shooter we’d really like to play and that’s how the project was born.
Heckabomb gradually came together during 2014 mostly evenings and weekends. Inspired by both arcade classic Asteroids and my own former project at Puppygames, Ultratron, it became twin-stick shooter with a touch of bullet-hell about it, based around alternating phases of resource gathering and frantic dodge-intensive combat. Ultimately it achieved its goals as a project: First it became a solid, energetic twin-stick game that I love playing myself. And secondly I learned a huge amount about Unity which I’m now putting to good use developing Puppygames’ own first Unity-based project, the much talked about Basingstoke.