Stardust is the working title of a 2d shmup that will probably be called Backfire. It's currently in development for PC, Mac and Linux. The earliest records of Backfire date back to 2007, when Ben first came up with the idea of making a game. We were in the demoscene movement at the time (we hung out on the Romanian Demo Party IRC Undernet channel, #rdemoparty), or what was left of it. In fact I was more like a male-groupie, since my skills (or lack thereof) never helped me do any work at demoscene accepted standards. What I did back then - and still do today - was vector graphics. I started with pixel stuff, probably around 2002, but impaired by laziness I promoted myself to vector graphics. Even so, I would rarely "release" anything and soon I barely drew anymore. Drew Barrymore? One thing was certain: I loved games. Ben was already a pretty good coder, but he's even better nowadays. So when he came up with the idea and asked me to join the project, I was instantly hooked. Yes, I had zero knowledge of what I were supposed to do or where to start. Right from the get go we established that the game should be kept simple, but even a very basic shmup would present plenty of challenges to an inexperienced guy like myself and was, in lack of a better word, scary. I'm pretty sure Ben felt the same way. We both understood that in order to make it work we would need to contain ourselves. We had some examples, too, as other demo sceners got stuck for various reasons while developing their own games. We didn't wanna trap ourselves, so we had to cull our ideas mercilessly.
We laid down the basics and started working on the game. Ben would code, I would draw sprites and maybe design the levels. After a couple of months we got a very basic working model. The hard work was only beginning. That's how it should have been, anyway. At some point Ben was working on the editor and we bounced ideas back and forth, trying to make it as functional as possible. I kept writing and rewriting the story, updated the wiki and toyed around with some sprite designs - all at very basic levels. Soon things started to fade out for no obvious reason. Probably we got tired and bored and lost sight of the objective. Not before long we dropped it altogether. We tried to revive it a couple of times, once in 2009 and once in 2010, if I remember correctly, but until late 2014 nothing major had been done in terms of game development. I guess life happened.
Then, in 2014, Ben asked me once again if I wanted to give Backfire another shot.To tell you the truth I never gave it up, not completely, and I was kind of hoping that Ben will ask me about it sooner or later. After almost 4 years of complete Backfire silence, things moved again. We've matured a bit and I really think we can pull it off this time.
Most of the old game stuff was scrapped. The basics are still there, but a lot of things changed. The code is new, the editor is new and the story is more detailed.
We laid down the basics and started working on the game. Ben would code, I would draw sprites and maybe design the levels. After a couple of months we got a very basic working model. The hard work was only beginning. That's how it should have been, anyway. At some point Ben was working on the editor and we bounced ideas back and forth, trying to make it as functional as possible. I kept writing and rewriting the story, updated the wiki and toyed around with some sprite designs - all at very basic levels. Soon things started to fade out for no obvious reason. Probably we got tired and bored and lost sight of the objective. Not before long we dropped it altogether. We tried to revive it a couple of times, once in 2009 and once in 2010, if I remember correctly, but until late 2014 nothing major had been done in terms of game development. I guess life happened.
Then, in 2014, Ben asked me once again if I wanted to give Backfire another shot.To tell you the truth I never gave it up, not completely, and I was kind of hoping that Ben will ask me about it sooner or later. After almost 4 years of complete Backfire silence, things moved again. We've matured a bit and I really think we can pull it off this time.
Most of the old game stuff was scrapped. The basics are still there, but a lot of things changed. The code is new, the editor is new and the story is more detailed.