Jordan On Ice Cream Island 1

I got my start in game development via Game Maker 7. I googled "Game making software" and it was the second result (First being some flash game with a level editor). This would have been around 2007-2008, which has made me realised I started making games 18 years ago a metric that would be more impressive if I had more to show :D
The first video game I made in GMK7 was called Jordan On Ice Cream Island and was a platformer staring my school friend Jordan. You travelled across different zones completing a had-full of levels per zone. Levels were single screen and made up of cubes, as a player you would navigate through each level looking for buttons and using a range of powerups to get past simple enemies. It's a very basic Mario clone with inspiration for portal as I think that was the game I was playing at the time. The one thing that jumps out to me from this game is the choice I made to have some cubes have no collision. My thinking was that it would be fun as players would have no idea what floors were safe or what walls they could walk through. I also don't remember why I decided to cut my friends face out of a picture from the school website and use it to make a game. Replaying the game for this post reminded me of bits about the game that I forgot about. Like how I had a "post" credit scene that was just a level with a background representing a letter sent to Jordan. The note was from myself/the friends group saying we would visit him on the island. I didn't think this was the case but obviously I had planned to make more of these games starting the rest of my friends.
Another thing to note is my awful spelling, not that it's improved much over the years but I was shocked at how bad some of the mistakes were. Please keep in mind if you watch the video this was 20 years ago so I was around 9-10 years old making this. I was also surprised by how much I remembered when it came to playing the game. I remembered that you had to use the little dent in Jordan's chin to grab hold of corners or that in some places you could go outside the screen to skip parts of gameplay.

Overall I was pretty happy with this game, I actually enjoyed replaying it but I feel nostalgia does a lot of the heavy lifting. I think I posted it on yoyogames sandbox which was the official site to share games made in GMK. I also have a backup of the finished game but sadly not the save file for the game, this was all before I became a digital hoarder. I have a recorded video of the game here if you wanted to see it being played. I'm sorry in advance for the audio, might be worth watching it on mute.
I loved using GMK7 and although I haven't touched the new versions of the engine from what I hear it's become far more capable as a 2D game engine. It's nice to see something still focus on being one thing rather than trying to do it all.

Jordan On Ice Cream Island 2

I can't pin point when I started working on the second game but I have a file from 2011. I feel like I started it at most a year after the first one but spent a very long time working on it. I wanted this one to apply everything I had learnt from the first and be an "actual" game. It suffered badly from feature creep, it started as an updated version of the platformer with more content and improved quality of life. Portal 2 had just come out though so I was copying parts I liked from that into JOICI2. I added a coop campaign, vs mode, the whole game took place in a lab where a penguin on a screen told you what to do. You also went into old rusted parts of the lab for some levels.
I spent a lot of time working on this game, at school we had a lesson for game making which used GMK8 so I got 1hr every 4 weeks where I could just sit in school and work on my game. It also meant I could go into the computer lab during lunch and work on it then as well. Me and my friends would also play other games from the yoyo games sandbox and tell the teacher we made them so we could get away with playing games. The main one was a 3D arena shooter which I'm desperate to find.
So I installed GMK8 on a VM and opened JOICI2, from where I left the game I had made about 130 levels, some of these levels were all part of 1 level. I would have door that took the player to a different space and they would then return to another section of the previous level, to make this I just copied the levels with the player starting in a different spot. The game was basically finished I just never knew how to end it. Which is stupid, looking back I should have just put a screen up that said the end and uploaded it to the sandbox then moved on to the next game. I instead just gave up and moved on to other project outside of GMK.
Looking over the game in GMK though there were a few features I forgot about, not only did the art get a pretty big upgrade (still programmer art) I also had water tiles for swimming, easter eggs on the main menu, secret levels. I know none of this is actually very impressive or ground breaking but I tend to give my self a hard time for not getting project finished so it's nice to see that back then I put in a lot of my free time into a project and made progress. This is also the reason I'm making these blog posts, I never put this game out there. I want to have a public record of the work I have done over the years even if it's really early work like this game.
Like with the first game here is a video of me playing through it, I wont play through the coop levels as I'm sat here on my own playing, I'm also not recording audio for this one as I know that I have voice recording in this and I'm not letting anyone hear those. I had to cut together a few videos as some levels just didn't work, in the end the whole play through was a little over 1 hour which is a lot longer than I would have expected. Unlike the first game I have not played through this one in a very long time. It was probably 2011 when I last played through the whole game as the only build I had a backup of was a demo build with a couple of levels.

Looking back at this one it was funny to see where I copied inspiration from. I noticed that there were elements of Half-Life 1 in here as well right up to the final chapter taking place in a strange world through a teleporter. You can also see me taking feedback from the last game into this one, I didn't do fake walls but instead used powerups to make the most of that mechanic. I also feel like this game was better in my memory, it's a bit of a relief seeing how bad this was in some places.