Kanfooz

It’s my first game. I made it using GameMaker when I was 12 years old. I created this game to try to make friends and make my parents recognize me and get me a Gameboy or a Gameboy color. Unfortunately, none of that happened. Neither people at school cared that I created a game (no teachers, no students) and my parents didn't care.

Since I was really bad at drawing computer art, I used spritesheets from https://www.spriters-resource.com/ most of them are different sonic sprites and enemies and bosses. So I created a game which was not an easy task. I didn't have anyone who could help me. All resources are in English which is not my first language and talk about programming languages and making "Hello World" projects. I discovered GameMaker by accident and wanted to use it but it was not easy for me for the same reasons. Finally, after spending daily trying to understand GameMaker and building a game using tons of little tutorials I can find on my 56k modem, I managed to make Kanfooz.

The game is called Kanfooz because that was the Arabic name for Sonic the Hedgehog on a children's cartoon channel called SpaceToon. The name is a nickname way of saying hedgehog in Arabic. I thought that was very suitable as I felt bad to be using sonic sprites. I wanted to make it like a big adventure with multiple different stages, bosses, and different mechanics to change the pace of the game. The different mechanics were in the form of different suits or power-ups: 

• Normal Sonic: it plays as a normal platformer with terrible controls and hitboxes where if you get hit, you will lose almost all your health if you don't react fast (forgive me, I was 12).
• Sonic in a Mecha Suit: it can shoot bullets and jump high. 
• Sonic in a Metal Suit: that can fly with fuel, so the level was designed to be vertical which is not a normal thing for a sonic game. 
• Sonic on a Jet Ski: it plays as an infinite runner like a Canabalt but with terrible colliders. You could miss the final exit and ruin the level and need to restart the game. Try to save at the beginning of the level so it is easy to restart if you get stuck.
• Boss Fights: they are mostly simple ones 

I know that this is not an ideal game but looking back at it and reflecting and thinking about what would have happened if my friends and family had encouraged me. I think if that happened, I would have not waited for another 6 years to create more games. Thanks for reading all of this and thanks for trying this game.