Game Play
Goal: Collect all the diamonds and proceed to the exit.
Keys:
- ↑/↓/←/→: Movement
About
One thing that hasn’t changed is that any excuse to work on something new will do. The excuse here was to build a game for a friend of the family. This was a simple collect-all-the-things style game which was easy to make relatively quickly. It might have been inspired by the sort of top-down puzzle games I were playing at the time. I think maybe Paganitzu, where you’re going through some ancient temple, collecting keys and pushing boulders into water to clear your path. That probably explains many of the elements in this game.
Of course the automatically firing guns was something I just had to have. I was obsessed with them, not so much because they’re “guns”, but because they imposed some timing into your movements. And they were just so impersonal. They didn’t care what you did at all, but you’d have to worry about how they operate. They were also easy to code.
Much like Adventure 2D, it started off as a plain text-based game, but I eventually added graphics to it. This version is a bit of a hybrid: the face sprite and water tiles are ASCII, and maybe a few other things?
It also morphed into a bit of a stealth game near the later levels, where you need to avoid all the moving sentries and patches of light. This was shortly after Metal Gear Solid came out and after watching someone play it, I was captivated by the game play, so I figured it’ll be cool adding something similar to this game. That’s sort of how this game evolved into: something seemed fun to add, so I did. It wouldn’t be the only one.