Old school, and in the best possible way.
There was a time, before easily accessible game engines could be plucked off of digital shelves for free, when programmers and game designers were much, much closer to being one and the same. You'd have a guy - let's call him Todd - and he'd come up with a trick. He'd build an engine that allowed specialized sprite scaling, or simulated 3D with orbs, or enabled freeform level rotation. Something, a gimmick that nobody else was doing. And that would become the game. You'd build the entire thing around Todd's trick, because nobody else was doing what Todd was doing and maybe this cool thing would be enough to help your game stand out, to make something new, fun, profitable.
And that's what we have here. A custom game engine built solely around the slice and dice physics that let you carve up the terrain. The important part: it works. Things mostly do what you would expect them to. You can be creative, mess things up, salvage them. When things go wrong, they usually go wrong in an amusing way and then you're reset to a nearby checkpoint.
The follow-up: it doesn't overstay its welcome, resists the urge to delve into increasingly convoluted physics puzzles with increasingly strict solutions. The game wants you to get where you're going, to have fun doing it and then maybe some more fun going for the collectibles. The tapes, which matter a lot because the music is so good they credit the guy in charge as the "Music Concierge", and the boring rocks, which don't matter at all but press you to be a bit more daring, more careful, to explore.
It's all wrapped up in a neat little notebook-sketched aesthetic, a silly story that has tons of personality and the aforementioned killer soundtrack. The core mechanic was incredible for its time, especially in an indie game, and still holds up incredibly well. A glimpse of what could have been in an industry less codified.
There was a time, before easily accessible game engines could be plucked off of digital shelves for free, when programmers and game designers were much, much closer to being one and the same. You'd have a guy - let's call him Todd - and he'd come up with a trick. He'd build an engine that allowed specialized sprite scaling, or simulated 3D with orbs, or enabled freeform level rotation. Something, a gimmick that nobody else was doing. And that would become the game. You'd build the entire thing around Todd's trick, because nobody else was doing what Todd was doing and maybe this cool thing would be enough to help your game stand out, to make something new, fun, profitable.
And that's what we have here. A custom game engine built solely around the slice and dice physics that let you carve up the terrain. The important part: it works. Things mostly do what you would expect them to. You can be creative, mess things up, salvage them. When things go wrong, they usually go wrong in an amusing way and then you're reset to a nearby checkpoint.
The follow-up: it doesn't overstay its welcome, resists the urge to delve into increasingly convoluted physics puzzles with increasingly strict solutions. The game wants you to get where you're going, to have fun doing it and then maybe some more fun going for the collectibles. The tapes, which matter a lot because the music is so good they credit the guy in charge as the "Music Concierge", and the boring rocks, which don't matter at all but press you to be a bit more daring, more careful, to explore.
It's all wrapped up in a neat little notebook-sketched aesthetic, a silly story that has tons of personality and the aforementioned killer soundtrack. The core mechanic was incredible for its time, especially in an indie game, and still holds up incredibly well. A glimpse of what could have been in an industry less codified.
4 Comments
@LordDarias It's not that modern commercial engines can't, it's just that the field is much, much more even when it comes to the foundation of a game and much less reliant on bespoke codebases. The rockstar programmer isn't really a thing anymore, outside of a few legacy players, and those individuals and personalities drove a lot of innovative game design because they not only could come up with clever tricks, but because they often had to in order to be competitive. You see a lot of it in the history or arcades and older PC titles, even consoles. Not always to great effect, but I loved the weird specificity of it and miss it being a more frequent thing.
I see what mean, and it is a shame, but I think what weve lost in plucky carmack types working close to the processor was worth it for the lower barrier to entry of creative types to the industry nowadays imo
@LordDarias Agreed.
LordDarias
8 months ago