I’ve been playing around with Hutch lately, and have been reading some game design articles. I found this pearl of wisdom from the developer of some old Commodore 64 games that I used to love as a kid.

(As an aside, said C64 developer now writes insurance software because it pays better).

The most interesting part of the article I thought was the developers game design process:

  • We investigated the platform and designed and wrote graphics architecture to exploit some feature of the machine.
  • We considered game environments that utilised that feature.
  • We create a player in a prototype level and worked on the control and movement.
  • We decided on the game idea and added enemies to the test level.
  • We worked on real levels constantly coming up with new ideas as we progressed.
  • We reviewed the levels , adding new ideas in where necessary

This is very similar to how I’ve been working on Hutch. Invent the graphics engine, think up game environments you can render in realtime, add player movement and control. The next stage is to add items and enemies.

Hopefully I’ll get time to do that later in the week.