Do you ever get the desire to go through your old work and see what you've done and how you've progressed? Have you ever spent time fixing up old prototypes and having fun playing them? The past few days, I had the sudden urge to do just this, and spent a couple hours every day looking through, organizing and playing my old games.
A few things that surprised me:
- The quantity of my prototypes, most of which were for testing out ideas that were never fully fleshed out. I have 15 flash prototypes, 11 java prototypes, 9 haxe prototypes, 2 javascript prototypes and 2 C++ prototypes, not including non-game utilities and other interesting bits of code (also not including my older PHP, rpgmaker and qbasic games). That's a LOT of prototypes! Imagine if each one was made into a full game (even something simple for a game jam).
- Most of these games died out before they had actual art/ui (yay programmer art). Sure, a lot of them died out "survival of the fittest" style, meaning that the ones that were fun were continued, and the ones that weren't were trashed. But quite a few of the prototypes died out simply because the artist working on it decided to drop the project (even when the artist suggested the prototype in the first place). I have a few interesting but ugly prototypes that never got the time of day they deserved (the best of which I have put into the "In Planning" section of my Games page.
- How quickly old code becomes incompatible with new operating systems. Obviously, the C++ ones would have issues, but the other programming languages are cross platform and I would've expected them to work out of the box. This was true for flash (have to give it credit there), haxe doesn't apply as those are all new prototypes, but several of the java prototypes could not run because of issues with JOGL or some strange dependency that made it not work on a 64-bit operating system. Having a 32-bit AND a 64-bit version of Java installed on my machine doesn't help the issue.
In any case, I have successfully looked through old prototypes and ideas, updated and organized my games page:
http://david.fancyfishgames.com/p/games.html , and decided to make several of my games playable there. I didn't upload the less polished/buggy prototypes as I'm a little embarrassed of them, but just send me an email if you want to try some. Don't say I didn't warn you!
Games now playable:
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| Assembler Quest (2005) - a first person RPG written entirely in x86 assembly... for those of you who know what that is... yes, I was crazy. Packaged it with dosbox so that it could be playable on newer computers. Dosbox also makes it playable on non-windows OS with a little work, Tim got it working on a mac, see screenshots here: http://pinterest.com/pin/279504720595243083/ |
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| DayBreak (2010) - My first flash game (not including prototypes), trying to make something small and interesting. Never finished, but it is more or less playable here: (link) . Yes, catgame was the codename for this project! |
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| Ilk Cardgame (2008) - a computer version of a cardgame I invented, with rules similar to M:TG except playable with a normal deck of cards. Finished BETA (fixed up some problems with JOGL, it now works on windows and "probably" works on other platforms - it still has some rare bugs with the AI and networking, but is playable). (link) |
Games Previously Playable:
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Drawscape (2012) - Drawscape is a physics platformer where you draw shapes to overcome many challenges and puzzles. Play through 22 unique levels as Kami, a curious fox girl with the power to create and destroy. Here's a video of the gameplay: (link)
Previously playable only at Kneoworld, I have now made a dev version of the game available here: (link) |
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| Deus Shift (2011-2012) - A strategic flash game. Was originally Arcane Lands, which was completely redesigned and released as Deus Shift (and is now being completely redesigned again! (link) |
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| Shadow of Time 4 (2008) - a parody RPG written entirely in javascript... not html5... (link) |
Played a lot of it and I need to say I am definitly impressed how much you have been working on even if you didnt finish most of them at least you were able to release a prototype. But everytime when I played one of your games / prototypes I had a really hard time to understand what was going on (except for drawscape, picked that one up quite fast) even daybreak took me some time to get into it, so I got the feeling that you have the guide the player a bit more. I dont know if you havent done it because most of the things arent polished or so, but thats just what I examined while playing.
ReplyDeleteYea, most of my games haven't been polished to the point Drawscape was, which is part of why it was the most successful. Also keep in mind that Daybreak and Ilk were never finished, so they are obviously missing some of the final touches haha. I doubt I'll go back to many of these games, but moving forward I've definitely learned a lot about making games playable.
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