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?”
Just mentioning, anyone who can make a working game on Atari 2600 should have no problems getting employed in video game industry.
It IS the most unforgiving platform EVER. If anyone thinks that writing a PC game in pure assembly is hard or frustrating, try 2600. 😉 Only real men can tame Atari 2600! 
How do you know, can you tame it?
Thank you for posting my comment. It is a good principle. 48 hour game compos are good places to see it in action.
MM, demoscene.
I’m far from really taming the 2600 but I’m trying. The hard(or should I say interesting?) part of 2600 is not the fact that it has only 128 bytes of RAM available(and 4096 bytes of ROM in the cartridge), but rather the funky graphics capabilities which require the programmer to update the graphics registers per-scanline because there is no framebuffer, just 5 primitive graphics objects. This requires lots of precise timing in form of CPU cycle-counting and as such it is a real pain to deal with in most cases.
When something goes wrong, there are no error messages and the system just hangs. The programmer can only remove a bunch of lines from the source and see if it works any better, and then try to re-implement the suspected buggy part of the code and wish for the best. Though it gets somewhat more bearable with time, I can just say that respect your protected mode CPUs and stable operating systems with modern toolchains.
Then again, it’s beating the challenges and restrictions of the platform which is the driving force behind people who explore and experiment with such devices.
The Atari platform developers had something telling them no..
I didnt read anything rly(at all), but I think u should make Soldat 2.0 using ur already done working on LD.
I find myself going to this site everyday, as well as the KAG site. Is there any reason I should be visiting this one anymore?
lol…yeah me too :q
you may not be making the games i want you to make, but at least you’re moving forward.
Ive been following this blog since it was created and i play Soldat since the 1.2.1 version. First it was Berserker that went down, now Link-Dead.
Still, i didn’t like LD that much anyway, it just didn’t appeal me, and there weren’t enough people playing it (yes ive donated for it).
The gameplay was “awkward”, lots of controls and honestly just looked like Soldat with “fancy graphics”.
But even if i didn’t like it much, reading that you would add doors, hacking system, elevators and such things, it started to sound better, to bad it was never real implanted in the game.
Now KAG on the other hand is strangely addicting and fun, and it even has doors and such mechanisms.
If you really like the way KAG is going, then you should really focus on it, but keep it free, dont do like LD, or else you might start losing players. Even if you do a paying system like Soldat, that you get features when you pay, you still should keep KAG free to all.
And i dont want my money back (didn’t pay much too), but since you said you would offer the “full” KAG for free when its released to the people that payed for LD, well its a good thing!
Clawbug: sounds like fun!
100Modem: thanks for that.