More thoughts; not as ambitious, still quite
Posted on 2009-11-21 17:43
Hmm… A certain person from the Daily Click made me think of perhaps starting to work again / redo an older project I was working on last Spring, called As Usual. The project seemed mighty amazing until I realized the gameplay was really monotonous; you could only run, jump & shoot, and the slow pace made the concept seem boring. The idea was that there’d be an action platformer with branching paths, so that you couldn’t actually die, but instead losing would just send you to another path. Not always of course, because that’d soon result in huge amounts of branching paths. I had the game quite much planned out, and I was very happy with the graphics.
After this certain person talked to me and praised the demo I showed off before stopping working on the game, I thought I could perhaps try to redo the thing, this time with faster pacing, and with more thought put to the levels. Perhaps I could make it something like Contra, just with those branching paths and suchalikes. One reason I even started considering the recreation was because I liked many of the ideas behind the game; along with the branching idea, my intention was to put in a lot bizarre and memey stuff, perhaps a bit like things Paul Robertson has made. Though on a smaller scale, of course; Paul is just plain amazing and I could never achieve something as cool as his animations. Anyway, the guns that were in the game, for example, were rather hilarious.
Also I liked most of the boss ideas and enemy designs, though due to the slow pace of the game the basic enemies were kinda boring to fight; they could stand a lot of shooting, and because you had unlimited ammo, you just stood there shooting at them until they eventually died. I guess one of the ultimate reasons the game failed was that I didn’t think about the engine enough; after I had got the main gameplay idea, I hurried to get to work on the actual levels, and only later on checked if the gameplay can support a longer game.
Anyway, I’m thinking of this now. I’d definitely want to use some ideas I had reserved for the game somewhere, and I’d anyway have quite a lot assets ready. The problem is just that this time I’d really have to think stuff through before doing anything. I don’t like thinking.
Tags: Plans