What the heck is this game?

So, Junk Sec at one point was just going to be your average shooter/platformer. Think of something like Metal Slug or Contra, though with full 360 degree aiming like ABUSE or Soldat.

 Over time though I got bored of the run and gun pace, I was finding it difficult to get the feel of right, enemies plain sucked to fight and pace out, and I shelved the project... twice. And then suddenly I got some inspiration after playing the RE2 remake. What if I slowed the combat down and added some item management? Suddenly the game actually worked. It's mad how a tweak like that can work.

So now this is a survival horror platform/shooter. What a mouthful!

Things are being built in Game Maker, with some assistance by Tiled. All the art is made in Aseprite. There's currently no ETA on release, this is a hobby project. (I know sorry)

Right now the biggest inspirations for the game are things like Doom, ABUSE, Resident Evil 4, Aliens, Event Horizon and weirdly Necromunda, which is a tabletop wargame that rules. It's one of those projects were you don't take things seriously and end up throwing loads of stuff you like in by accident, hopefully it congeals into something cool.

Who the hell are you?

I'm Shoehead, from Ireland. By day I'm a body piercer. By night I sleep and sometimes I'm also a pixel artist and game dev. Usually more of a pixel artist than a dev tbh. I'm the only person working on this game. All problems are caused by me or by sleep deprivation.

How long has this game been in development for?

This game has a long history, dating back to 2017 and a jam entry for Awful Jam's Awful Summer Jam. The theme that year was Bootlegs and I made a weird Doom/Wild Guns crossover thing that mostly worked. Find it here: https://shoehead.itch.io/dum

While sketching up sprites for that project I drew a doomgirl next to doomguy and it's technically the first version of who would end up being Abigail

About maybe 6 months later I started working on a platformer. I was determined to make something Doom-like without actually making a retro-fps. And returned to this sprite and artstyle

There's Abi in her Muscle-girl glory up there. Things are very very Doom-like also. Further refinement followed

And then, a prototype




And so this got dropped eventually. Why? Well the artstyle proved to be INTENSE. Sprites were big and detailed, backgrounds were massive and it became difficult to add new weapons and enemies.
It's a shame, and it was a hard thing to just throw out. I did trigonometry for this for god's sake!

2019 rolled around and I wanted to try again. I wisely decided on a smaller, simpler sprite but this time I tried to do twin stick stuff


Oh yeah and then in 2021 it WAS a Doom mod!


Once again the sheer volume of assets needed killed this project but I had a heap of fun.
Eventually in 2022 I started on the current version of the game. There hasn't been 2 years of sustained work because of some awful stuff happening in my personal life. Weirdly though the stress lead me to spend maybe the most productive 6 months of my life on the game before I had to shelve it for about a year to sort everything out irl. Now that's mostly sorted out.. I'm back on it

Anyway that's all for this introduction, next time I'll either recap July's work or post about the current state of the story and characters