I gotta finish this damn computer game.
God, I’m restless; I want everything to start happening now. I want to fast-forward through the next five months of grueling work and just be there.
I have no excuse for slacking off. As Adam Derman once told me in a letter (about Karateka): “You dumb shit. You’ve dug your way deep into an active gold mine and are holding off from digging the last two feet because you’re too dumb to appreciate what you’ve got and too lazy to finish what you’ve started.”
Ed Badasov is no longer my product manager. He’s been replaced by Brian Eheler. Brian has been lobbying both me and Ed for some time to get Prince of Persia, and finally prevailed. It’s fine with me. Better than fine.
Rented something called Lady Beware. Poor Diane Lane. She hasn’t been in a decent movie since she was 13.
Brian Eheler and I had our big meeting yesterday. He took out his notebook and asked me so many questions about Prince of Persia – How many disks? How much memory? What kind of documentation? – that by the end of it, I was all jazzed up and adrenalized.
It made me feel like the project is real, that it’s really going to ship in four or five months, and I’d better get cracking. I promised Brian I’d have a preliminary version ready for QA in eight weeks – the first concrete promise I’ve made to anyone. Usually I just say something like “It should be ready by January… 1999. Ha ha.”
The meeting erased any doubts I might have had about Brian’s effectiveness as a product manager. This is what I needed all along: someone to push me. He blows Ed out of the water. Anyway, I’m revved up to work on POP.
Had lunch with Don Daglow, head of Broderbund’s Entertainment Group. Don got his B.A. in playwriting, so he was interested in hearing about the screenwriting stuff. He’s eager to publish Prince of Persia and would like to start on an MS-DOS conversion as soon as possible.
Tomi and Doug got to be present at the historic unveiling of Steve Jobs’ new computer, the “Next,” at the San Francisco Symphony.
Deep in programming mode. Nine hours today trying to integrate the new game code with the old builder code I haven’t touched in six months. It’s like going in with a wrecking ball and bashing the building to the ground, then saying “Now, can we use any of these timbers? Oh, here’s a nice chair we can save! Let’s put it over here!” A nightmare.
Drove to Broderbund early in the morning, let myself into the building and worked for ten hours straight. Like in the old days. I’m starting to see code patterns floating in my brain as I drift off to sleep at night… and, disturbingly, when I wake up in the morning.
The game and the editor are now integrated on a single disk. Very slick.
Five months of this and I really will be done by March.
“I like games where you can shoot things. Your game has no rewards except getting to the next level. It’s all survival and no triumph.” –Tomi
She’s right about POP. It’s empty and lifeless. I don’t know if even the shadow man and swordfighting will change that.
On the other hand, I put in a new door which looks pretty good.
Oh, God. I want this game to be a hit. Like Karateka.
Maybe this whole modular-design approach is wrong. Maybe the thing to do is put in a whole bunch of hard-wired enemies, one after another, and forget the whole free-floating, random-access, 24-screens-per-level idea.
24 screens, if they’re linked sequentially, could give a playing experience as satisfying as a whole level of Karateka. But they should be in the form of obstacles to be overcome one after another. For example:
- A chasm that has to be jumped
- A gate that has to be raised
- A guard that has to be killed
The way it is now, you’re plunged into a huge arena with no overall idea of what you’re trying to accomplish except “get out.” It’s too perplexing, especially at first.
Maybe after the first 10 or 15 levels, I could start introducing some real Lode Runner/Dr. Creep “puzzle” type game play. But in the beginning, it should be pretty much left-to-right (like Karateka) with a little bit of up-and-down. So the player can get his bearings.
YEAH!
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