About a year ago I was looking for game ideas to try and work on a new game, I thought about creating a game based on past game that I made and see what the difference were and how much I changed in terms of game development and I thought it was a good idea and decided to see it through.
I had to pick a game or at least a playable prototype (I don’t finish many projects), and I choose a game I did 5 years ago, I participated in a game jam called banana jam sponsored by a studio in Portugal called Nerd Monkeys, I was part of the team that created a game called “Always pay the troll toll”, the game was a top down dungeon crawler, with procedurally generated dungeons and I was the programmer on it. I played the game recently to remember what I did and noticed it had a lot of issues but that makes sense, the team that I work with was made of people from other teams that didn’t finish the game jam, including my own team which I was trying to manage, so managing to release a playable game in a fragment of the time other teams had to do it is actually quite good.
So I took the game we created for the game jam as the reference point of what I wanted to do and started thinking about how would I do it now, what would I change about it and if I could make it better (without changing it too much). I also did not want to use the art or the sound because they don’t belong to me but I could use the code files which I had created, spoiler alert I didn’t keep any of the existing code, all of them were deleted and replaced, I expected as much, a lot of things can change in 5 years and hopefully I’m better now than I was 5 years ago.
I will try and breakdown development in the following days… stay tuned…