This year has felt quite stale - Units outside of UNIT 9 have felt like filler with little creative freedom or activity that interests me.

From 2 years ago to now, I have studied and practiced general and theoretical game design & low-level programming in the C language - focusing on optimization, memory management, & modding open-source games in my spare time to experiment with designing mechanics.
For the FMP, I have chosen Pathway 2; my goal is to prove I am capable of primarily individually developing videogames from my own visions.

It would help me a lot in the future to have this clarity in my own abilities in the designing, planning, programming & art/animation elements - more than enough to sustain my own creations with limited outsourcing.

My game will be a Roguelike Top-Down Movement Shooter taking place in a mafia-owned skyscraper warehouse, following a wheelchair-bound journalist protagonist ascending with a constantly powering-down lift with the goal of reaching the top of the skyscraper while slaughtering the vast contained population.

The game focuses on complex momentum-based movement that clashes with tight inventory management, as the separate wheels on the chair can only be managed with an empty hand, preventing simultaneous acceleration and shooting. The environment will be destructive, with enemies and improvised single-use weaponry littered throughout. If I can manage, I would like to include advanced enemy AI with strategic positioning, and procedurally generated floors.

I will also be managing the art & animation, with a simple abstract pixel-art style to highlight the functional elements.

My research and inspiration will come from games I have frequently played myself, studied, as well as other games studies for the sake of this project.

This game is designed with purely my own interests in mind; target audience is not a concern as my hope for this project is that I will be pleased with the result. Positive feedback from an unlikely audience is well appreciated.

I will program using Notepad++; a text editor with syntax highlighting and other helpful mild tools, GNU compiler collection for its C compiler evoked with the windows command prompt terminal, SDL3 and possibly other development libraries (quoting the SDL page, “Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform development library designed to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, and graphics hardware”).