Repurposing Code

Before going back to school for software engineering, I spent almost fifteen years in the restaurant industry.  One of the terms that chefs like to throw around is "repurposing" food; this is where you take the components left over from previous dishes and put them together to make something entirely new.

My family is currently in the midst of moving.  I'm not getting much done on my current projects, because they're all at points that require a lot of focusing, and I don't have time fore that.  What I do have is a lot of short sporadic bursts of time.  So I decided to issue myself a challenge: could I repurpose code from some of my other projects to create an entirely new game?

I'm keeping it simple for this challenge, so the goal is to make something similar to Sega's classic arcade game Pengo.  To work with, I've got the game engine from Wizard's Scroll, which already includes code for pushing blocks, and the random maze generating algorithm I wrote for Lore.  (Of course, one's in Python and one's in JavaScript, but hey, let's not make it too easy, right?)  So, "all" I have to do is take the parts I need, rewrite them to work together, and then add in enemies.

 

I just started it this afternoon.  Not very far yet, but who knows?  Maybe I'll finish it up and throw it on Kongregate.....

Don't Fall in Love With a Mechanic

No, I don't mean that you shouldn't develop romantic feelings for a person who fixes things for a living. (My mother did that, and I turned out just fine.) No, I mean that when you're designing a game, you shouldn't get too emotionally attached to a game mechanic.

Finished games seldom look like the designer originally intended - things change over time, things you thought would be fun turned out not to be, things that you didn't think would be fun turn out to be the best part of the game, etc.  I've seen many a game ruined because the designers came up with a mechanic that sounded good on paper, but wasn't actually all that interesting once implemented, and yet the developers refused to take it out.

For instance, remember Yoshi's Island DS?  The game that took the original Yoshi's Island concept and then said "hey, what if baby versions of other Mario characters could sit on Yoshi's back, and they each had a different power? And then sometimes you had to switch back and forth?"  Turns out that wasn't a very fun game mechanic!  The "powers" felt incredibly forced (Wario's involved coins, Peach's involved umbrellas, and I don't even remember Luigi's...) and having to backtrack and switch characters over and over is never fun (see also: Banjo Tooie, Donkey Kong 64).  The original Yoshi's Island didn't need it, and it's a concept that should have been nixed in development, but for whatever reason (perhaps publisher's insistence?), the developers left it in, and the game is poorer because of it.

And so it happened with the sokoban I'm working on.  I had this idea that in every room, you'd have to get to a "star wand", which would then eliminate all the star blocks in the room.  The idea being that you'd solve the room one way to get to the wand, and then solve it in a different way to get from the wand to the exit.  Sounds good in paper, but when I started designing levels, I found that in most rooms it was just adding unnecessary steps to finish the room.  So I'm either removing it, or at the very least only implementing it in very specific rooms that actually benefit the idea.  It may mean I need to call the game something other then "star wand", though.

Like the games, Hate the term

I hate the term "metroidvania".  It's used to desribe games that are like Metroid, meaning they are non-linear and encourage exploration, and are unlike Castlevania games, which (apart from Castlevania 2, which everybody hated) are linear.  Then in 1997, 11 years and 14 games into the series, Konami released Sympony of the Night (which everybody loved for the same reasons they hated Castlevania 2), which was non-linear and encouraged exploration much the same way that Metroid games do.  For this reason, the press dubbed it "Metroidvania", meaning "it's a Castlevania game, except this one is like Metroid!"  How that term came to describe every game that's like Metroid makes no sense to me.

...at least it's still better then "castleroid".