Frame of War
Summary
| Pros | Cons | To Improve |
|---|---|---|
| -Boss is extremely fun -Cheat command to skip initial stages - Difficult game, challenging for even those who consider themselves good. |
- First level (maybe next two as well) are slightly boring. Intended to be this way, but not to that degree. - Not designed at all for casual players. |
- Make initial stages more fun/interactive. - Add difficulty levels to game so the player can decide on what to do |
The first game I made (used Gamemaker, not a programming language), from 2019. Click here for arrow key version. Click here for the mouse move (my preferred) version. If you get a thing telling you to install something or skip the installation, just skip it. To my knowledge, it doesn’t actually do anything (you don’t need it to play the game).
Post
During my second year of realising that a thing called programming existed, one of our school assignments was to make a game. Now, almost everybody in the class didn’t even bother making the most basic platformer which was enough to get an A, but, who am I to care for a grade? If I’m gonna spend time doing something, you best believe I’m gonna enjoy the final product.
And thus, Frame of War was made (I might’ve been playing a lot of Warframe at the time).
It’s the first game I’ve ever made, and it’s also annoying to beat. Below is a video of me completing it. 3:05 if you want to get to the good part.
For an extra challenge, I decided to beat the game without any lasers. Even though the (spoilers) boss has some anti-laser mechanisms so you can’t spam lasers to kill it (to a certain degree), the masochist in me decided “Hey, this game isn’t hard enough. Let’s beat it without this feature that I spent time adding in!”. So that’s what I did.
The first 2 levels are meant to be easy - to pull you off your guard. The 3rd level is also simple as long as you stay in the center; if you don’t, you’re going to meet hell. It looked obvious to me, but the people who played always moved away and er… Having 3 big aliens on your screen is not the best idea. Stage 3 Boss is a bit psycho… In the video, I killed it fast enough so that you don’t have to see a certain surprise (that may involve approximately 8 extremely rapid close range fireballs). Dodgeable, but, barely.
This took me at least 7 attempts to get a video for this article; and I’m the only person that has beaten this so far. Even though the timings and abilities were coded by me, the final boss is still difficult.
I made the level music from Musenet (OpenAI’s music agent). Boss music from Fatima (Stein;s Gate). Coincidentally, if you (laserless) shoot optimally at the boss (and do the bullet stacking like I did), you should be able to get the boss to stage 2 by the time the beat drops.
If you want to try it yourself, download the exe. There’s a version where you use arrow keys to move, and another where you use the mouse.
Click here for the mouse control version
Click here for the arrow key version.
Yes, that sounds like a virus. No, it’s probably not a virus. Yes, if your antivirus goes haywire just listen to it. Maybe there’s a way I can host it on the website?
Anyways, that’s it. Good luck. If you get bored of doing the first few levels, you can manually add lasers and scores by cheating with the ‘P’ button. Be warned, cheating lasers and doing the boss with said cheated lasers is… well, cheating. You can skip to the boss though, and then try doing it laserless from there.