Soldat is good because it has shit code. It wouldn’t ever be good if it had good code. Why?
http://the-witness.net/news/2011/06/how-to-program-independent-games/
Presentation by creator of Braid. I could have done a similar presentation, lots of great stuff here.
Check it out at 2:20 –http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK0IKeAoGDU
Most comments below my last post are amazing. Thank you for them. I decided to post one little gem here from Snow:
“I mentioned Mare and Raigan. I was chatting with them once and we all came to a simple conclusion. If you are creating a game and you want to focus on fun. Sometimes it’s best to set a bunch of restrictions first. You already did this with Warmonger. You take out the pen and paper and limit yourself to just simple shapes and say you pretend like you’re designing the game for an old 8 bit console like the Atari 2600 or the NES. So you have memory constraints, graphical limitations and even audio limitations. This forces you to only focus on what is important in the game to convey what the game is about. Say it’s a game set in space. Given your extreme limitations, what would be the key elements required in the game to first make it look like a Space themed game? Second, what’s going to make it fun? Well you have your given elements: Stars, a spaceship, astronaut. Then what? A moon, aliens, weapons, etc?”
About 2 months ago I came to an important realization. Actually I don’t feel I thought of it, it sort of found me. These are game design principles. Universal and guaranteed to just work. The holy grail of game design.
This isn’t anything new and I feel no ownership over the ideas. I did though, come to my own understanding of these principles and it changed how I perceive game making.
It started because of my random interest in random stuff… read more »
Some people have found out about my secret hobby. I will announce everything very soon. I will explain what has been going on during the past month and what the hell is up with Link-Dead. There are countless reasons why I have been sitting quiet and I will explain everything in the tiniest detail. I am very surprised myself at what happened.
Stay tuned.
