Today I wanted to showcase something only a few people have seen which is the version of External-Dimension: Mainframe I had made during my senior year of college. It can be hard to keep things in perspective especially when that project has been so close to you. Seeing where you came from and how much progress, improvements or changes were made gives you a proper perspective on what has happened up to this point.

Originally I started off working on this game in my senior year in college using AS3 (ActionScript3) via Adobe Flash SC5/6. My goal was to challenge myself to make something unique rather than just copying from the book. The majority of people were following a tutorial in the book for the class and while I certainly could have done the same I wanted to make something unique. It definitely took a lot more effort on my part to reach the same result and lead to a lot of sleepless nights as I struggled with the code but the end result was something I was proud of. Many of my classmates urged me to keep working on it as did family.

Here I sit over 8 years later looking back at this old version of the game and it is nearly unrecognizable. It went from being a hyper difficult platformer to one that was focused on fast paced movement and combat. It also went from being made in Flash using AS3 to being made in Game Maker Studio 1 using GML. In many ways you could not even call them the same game at the end of the day. I was hesitant to put out this post as it can be hard to look at past work without feeling embarrassed but it is important to see how far you have come on a journey. No one starts off making perfectly polished games, music, art, videos etc. as you are always learning and improving.

This week the game will be available for purchase on steam and that means it is time for me to get back to the grindstone. No major update next weekend however I will showcase an older build of the game from a few years ago because I think it is important to show just how much work has gone into this project over the years.

– CVM |Vanish Mantle