"NO ME - The Future Is ours" is an in-development  ~15-30 minute long free game in which you play as a cartoon sheep with a photorealistic gun traveling to the future to follow a mysterious Stranger.

It's also my first foray into Game Maker code, after years of being stuck in RPG Maker 2003! Development started half a year ago and has been on-and-off since.

PHILOSOPHY

NO ME is, ahead of anything, my attempt to get a self-programmed game done and out. Up until recently I was very preoccupied with doing everything "right" while making it; this prevented me from getting into a real flow-state during the process, and made me so anxious it hampered the game's momentum for a month.

In that way, it follows in the tradition of late 00s, early 10s era Game Maker and Flash platformers, such as the works by biggt/TheAnemic.

In-keeping with both aforementioned points, I've embraced (within reason) the drive for hack-solutions, and the occasional need to utilise  code assets by other developers.

This being the first time I've really been faced with coding my own game in a programming language rather than an event systems, there's a number of challenges ahead of me for it.

1st: TEXT BOXES

Thankfully Abe Estos had me covered with their excellent Game Maker asset, AGaTE!

AGaTE is still early in development, but a remarkably easy-to-implement  text box system with animated character portraits! Perfect for what I'm going for.

2nd: ENEMY BEHAVIOR

This is one I'm still figuring out. The game as a whole will have 2 enemy types (like I said, it's very short), of which only one is currently finished.

Enemies, as I do them right now, are state-machines that follows simple patterns according to the player's actions, and enter a "dead" state when shot sufficiently.

A number of things in NO ME can be shot, as a matter of fact. It really is video games.

Whatever the case, when the game comes out, don't be surprised if the enemy AI still feels slightly jank. I'm not confident in my ability to make enemies that are truly "fun to fight" at this current state, and to a degree, that's not the point of the enemies in NO ME.

3rd: THE ART

Even though the game's art style is fairly plain, with lots of flat colors and minimal shading, it is nonetheless a great challenge to face.

For a segment in the later game I will not yet show, the scene will be pretty busy, and this art - by my standards as a pixel artist - is very big. Things such as perspective, size and readability matter more strongly than ever before.

While I get all that prepared, check out some of the art for one of the future's residents:

Q: WHY THE WEIRD NAME?

"NO ME" is in reference to a bit of text from biggt's game LaLaLand 3, which denotes the main character's "HOME" like this in the game's background:

I used to misread that, sometimes, and think it was meaningful. In NO ME itself, I use this misreading as an indication of an absence of myself in the proceedings and the future.

I hope you look forward to playing this short and strange thing.

-Quinn