Experimental Video Games
Thursday, February 26th, 2009
While developing a humble beat ‘em up game (an homage to such classics as Final Fight and Turtles in Time), I found myself in need of a way to organize various scenes. The game would start with a loading screen, transition into a short narrative, and finally cut to the title screen. Once the actual gameplay began, another scene would be needed to keep track of the entities, images, sounds, and other game-related objects for stage one. In keeping with the ethics of object-oriented programming, I decided to make the scenes themselves objects by creating a scene entity with methods for loading, activation, deactivation, and unloading.
Lately, I’ve been wondering if I haven’t developed a bit of ADHD. I have a handful of game ideas that I want to explore and the list keeps growing. The problem I’m facing is how to choose the best ideas and spend time turning them into projects. When I completed the scene entity (which took very little time), I made the decision to design a small game to test its usefulness (which took much more time). It turns out that the scene entity has very little to do with the final game, yet I am left with something much more satisfying. (more…)