I can’t think of a better way to get this brand new blog rolling than by using some old, recycled material! I wrote this postmortem in December, soon after putting the final touches on Smiley and his Shooty Adventure for the Nintendo DS. I figured it would be worth re-working the whole thing and posting here.

When I started writing Smiley, I had three clear objectives:

The first, and the reason this project even started, was to write a game for the Nintendo DS. A friend at work bought a supercard, a magical homebrew enabling device, for his DS. I’ve always loved coding for embedded devices, and this was the perfect excuse to write something for the DS!

The second was to write a shoot-em-up. This one was a long time coming. Ever since I was re-introduced to this wonderful genre through GridRunner++ and DUO I knew I had to write some sort of shmup, but the opportunity never presented itself.

The third, and perhaps the most important objective, was to throw alot of fancy FX across the screen.

So a shooty, FX intense DS game? Almost. I also had this lingering feeling that whatever I wrote had to be innovative.

So a shooty, FX intense, innovative DS game. On my way to work, on the way back, and even at work I thought about what I wanted to write. I thought about ways to use the touchscreen, ways to do something different, ways to write an innovative game. I wasn’t short of ideas. What I was short of was good ideas. After much deliberation, I finally said, “Fuck it! I’m writing a Robotron-style shmup, and it’s going to be great! It may not be innovative, but it’ll be damn fun!”

So a shooty, arena-based, FX intense DS game. I got to work. The “design document” for Smiley was the best I’d ever written. It was a quarter of a sheet of paper with tonnes of doodles on it. There was a smiley face in the middle of the page with a bunch of bullets spewing out of it. Some scratchy looking doodles, each representing a different type of enemy, surrounded it. And a mess of faint dots and numbers decorated the background, representing my vision for a rainbow-coloured, pixel-intense FX system. All my objectives were represented on this scrap of paper. What more does a design document need to do?

I coded Smiley obsessively after work everyday for around two weeks until I had something good going. The player moved smoothly, the enemies functioned, a basic level scripting system was in place. Everything seemed to flow. With all of that done, I was finally able to dedicate a solid week of development to throwing FX across the screen! The end results, I thought, were spectacular.

Getting to grips with the DS was difficult, but seeing it unwilling to flinch as I tossed hundreds of pixels around the screen gave me a huge appreciation for the power of the DS. It’s a different style of coding. Apart with some brief work on the Game Boy Advance, I’d never worked with “hardware sprites” or “hardware backgrounds” before. I’d never done stuff on a system where I was so close to the metal. Figuring out the state of a button is literally peeking a memory location. None of that “hardware abstraction” crap here.

The DS hardware also forced me to change my style of game design. Everything had to be kept simple. I couldn’t have LUA scripted levels or enemies, or other such fancy things we take for granted on the PC. I couldn’t use a crazy amount of math for enemy AI. Everything became simpler, but the game turned out better because of it. I spent less time writing complex sub-systems for the game, and as a result, I had more time to make it fun.

My final hurdle came two days before I aimed to have Smiley done. I realized that I still hadn’t written any levels! This, by the way, is my weakpoint, my Achilles Heel if you will. I can write games, but I can’t write content. Smiley was different. The simplicity of its design made it effortless to write tonnes of great levels, and I was able to knock out 50 levels in two days. Getting over this “fear” of writing content was, without a doubt, one of the high points of Smiley’s development.

When I finally got to play Smiley on my DS, it was quite amazing. I was, and still am, really pleased with how it turned out. Not only did I write a fantastic game, but I learned a lot from it too. I learned that simple, focused design can result in a better game. Simple code and quick implementation means that more time can be spent polishing and balancing the game. I also learned that explicitly aiming to write an innovative game can be counterproductive. A better approach is to write the game you want to write (whether it’s a cloned, derivative, or evolutionary idea), and as you start tweaking the gameplay, the innovations will present themselves. Since every game designer thinks differently, I think every game has a character and feel of its own.

So a shooty, arena-based, FX intense, awesome DS game? I’d say so.