Rocket Sledge draws its inspiration from a game called
Turboreki, which translates to Turbo Sleigh. It was a game made by young me
back in 2004. I've been planning and trying to do a sequel but nothing ever
came of it. So it is now quite fitting that I'm doing a spiritual successor to
it and it happens to be the 10 year anniversary of Turboreki.
The game was made for a small Christmas game competition held by a small Finnish website. Turboreki
was both the first and the last game I ever managed finish making. Although, even
it was never really finished as it lacked some planned features and a final polishing
touch, but close enough I would say.
However, much to my surprise the game won and I ended up
with all the prestige associated with the first place and won some PC game as a prize. It
also received positive feedback from many players and fellow game makers. I
remember it being a pretty big deal for me back then.
I have to say in all honesty I don't remember how I got the
idea for the game. It could be that the idea sprang from some other stuff I was
doing at the time. I remember the rocket sleigh with the wagons being there
from the start in some form or other. The rest of the game just grew around it.
The game's development took maybe about a month and a half with me
balancing my time school, friends and doing something else than just spending time in front of a computer. I submitted the
game just in time for the deadline, a few days earlier of Christmas Eve 2004
and that was it.
The game was made with CoolBasic which is a Basic-like programming language aimed at making game development
easy. It was made with CoolBasic Beta 5 which was back then the newest version.
Since then Beta 10 has come out and the a new improved version has been in the
works some years now. I owe big thanks to CoolBasic for getting me into
programming. It was easy enough to pick up within the limited attention span of
young me, even though, it took months of experimenting with it before I had the
skills to make Turboreki.
The game's graphics were drawn by me with some software I've since forgotten. They weren't anything spectacular even back then but they did their
job. I was especially proud of the big white moon in the background. Despite
its simple outlook the game required relatively powerful computer to run smoothly.
CoolBasic didn't support hardware acceleration in graphics so everything was
done by the CPU. The snowing effect was the one that slowed down performance
the most and that's why I made the option to turn it off. I'm glad that hardware acceleration isn't an issue when developing for Android.
The simple sound effects were just something I obtained from
some free game development resource pack. But the soundtrack was another strong feature of the game in addition to the fun game play. The songs were some well known Christmas carols
recorded by two Finnish guys named Niko and Janne. If I remember correctly
their Christmas band was a side project for them but I've since forgotten what
was their main band. Anyways, the guys were
happy have their tracks in the game.
Rocket Sledge aims to provide a fun gaming experience. It
will use the elements that worked in Turboreki, modernize and improve on other
areas and implement some new ideas that I've had during this past decade or old ones
that I was never able to realize due to limitations of the time or my
abilities. That's what makes Rocket Sledge a spiritual successor to Turboreki. Perhaps I
would even go far to say that it will be an homage to my young self in the past
from me in the present.
Thanks for reading, have a nice day and I'll see you in the
next post.
P.S
For those interested, here is a download link to Turboreki. The game is in Finnish but in the starting menu
the top text will start the game. Please, note that it will only work on Windows and has
no support for changing resolutions. It might not even run at all, as I had
some trouble getting it to work. Download and play it at your own risk.
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