After my last post about the happenings after Larry the Dinosaur 2 was released, I realized that I didn't say much about the development of the game. I will now.
The first attempt at Larry the Dinosaur 2 never made it past a playable demo. But it was distributed online. It was awesome.
Everyone liked it, so what happened? I don't remember. I can only guess that it suffered the fate of many playable demos that were never completed as full games, that fate being this: the demo is only the beginning, to complete it is a full-time job. It's easy to slap together a rather-promising playable demo over a night or two. And it's easy to fool yourself into believing that you can expand upon it just as easily and, with a just little more effort, finish a work of pure awesomeness.
But the truth is--if it only took you a day to make a playable demo--it's probably running on top of some code you ordered through the drive-thru. This is not always the case, but it was for me.
Maybe it seemed like to much work to complete it. Maybe the code was such a mess that I couldn't expand upon it without a zillion bugs coming out of the woodwork. But somehow, the game vanished, people were let down, and so was I.
Then the summer came. Sunny skies and warm weather. Maybe it was too warm and it cooked my brain, but I thought that making a prequel to Larry the Dinosaur would be awesome! I'd call it, Larry the Dinosaur: Zero (original, right?). This would have pixel-by-pixel scrolling whereas the last attempt had only static screen-by-screen progression like Larry the Dinosaur 1.
I charged at it as furiously as I had the last. And it was awesome. I had a playable first level. It was plush and green. It had animating waterfalls and pixel-by-pixel scrolling. It even had a boss at the end of the level you had to defeat; it looked like a giant mutated mosquito and it flew across the screen as it dropped slimy spit balls that Larry had to dodge.
Well, you might ask, what happened to that one. It got erased!!! Yes. I didn't back it up regularly. I was heart-broken...and also pissed at Linux for erasing my hard drive when I just meant to install it on another partition.
Whatever. It was my fault; it's never a wise idea to keep only one copy of your code. I did think about backing it up, just in case, but I ignored my brain and let stupid take over.
So that brought me to my third attempt at another follow-up to Larry the Dinosaur 1. I had an idea and spent all night developing a...wait for it...playable demo; didn't I mention something about those earlier? Anyway, it had pixel-by-pixel scrolling and I think you could run around and shoot at things.
So how did this one make it to the finish? It didn't. At the time, "complete" meant to me a game that takes hours for the player to complete, not just 15 minutes, and the game seemed stretched thin even at that length. So I bought some wrapping paper and a bow and released it online under the guise that it was "complete." Though, there was no "real" plan, so technically it was complete at any time I wanted it to be.
Ok, so if I didn't finish it, how did I make it past a playable demo? Well, for starters, I had some practice: it's much easier to do something over once you've done it before. I already made some programs that had playable characters running around shooting at things, those were known as the last two attempts, so getting up to speed was easy. And I also wrote better code. The code was still bad, but a bit better than what I had done before.
I didn't know what I was doing (not that I ever do). The game could have failed just as easily as the other two. I just started coding-a-blazing.
It started the same as the other too. So why did I this one make it to the finish line? Did I just get lucky? Maybe. Or maybe I was just smart enough this time to not start over and to backup the game.
Actually, now that I think about it, those are the two major mistakes I made that contributed to the games not being completed.
It makes sense, doesn't it? I assume I cancelled the first demo because I lost interest or because I was tempted to start over and "make something better." I put that in quotes because I think, if I finished the first demo, it would have been just as good in its own way. It's all to easy to fool yourself into thinking that you should just scrap everything and start over because you dream bigger, or possibly because you received some negative feedback from someone. Don't do it! Finish it, even if you cut corners, and you'll be happy that you did.
The second time I failed to properly backup my code. I'm sure I had some copies on my computer. But I lost everything on my computer! So always backup your code to removable storage or to the internet. Better yet, learn source control!
So I take that back. I don't think it's a bad thing to start from a playable demo. After all, that could be the spark that ignites your drive to finish the game. Don't worry too much if your code is messy, you can always clean up afterwards.
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