One of the things I like about computers is that history is often perfectly preserved. I can still use DOSBox to play all my favourite old DOS games from my childhood. More importantly, I backed up many of the games I made myself with Klik & Play and its successors as I was growing up. Many of these old projects seemed amazing to me at the time, but now that I can do better I’m not that proud of them any more.
One of these unfinished projects is Lone Starr, and yes, it is named after the character from Space Balls. Having played Solar Winds, my younger self was still interested in making a game where you could freely explore in space.
Not much of Lone Starr got made before it was abandoned, but I did implement shooting some basic enemies, flying your ship, and collecting ores from asteroids in a nearby asteroid field. You could then head back to the planet and view the menu, but this is where the game runs out of content.
At the time, the planets in Lone Starr were planned to be simple waypoints in space that let you re-fuel or trade like the ones in Solar Winds. It crossed my mind that I could try to make the planets more interesting, but at the time I didn’t think it was possible for me! In a way, I was right, because it’s already taken five iterations to get the planets in Super Space Galaxy to where they are, and I’m now working on a sixth.
I abandoned Lone Starr because it wasn’t very fun to play and I didn’t know how to improve it. I just knew it had a host of problems. My hand-drawn graphics weren’t great. The ship wasn’t that fun to fly around. The enemies weren’t interesting to fight. Mining asteroids felt like a chore. Of course, it didn’t help that the game that inspired me to make Lone Starr, Solar Winds, hadn’t actually been that fun either.
What I hadn’t fully realized at the time was that this long list of obstacles was normal. If I’d tried out different ideas I might have been able to make the ship’s controls more fun to use. (A lock-on feature much like the one I implemented in Super Space Galaxy would have helped.) Perhaps I could have cut out the asteroid mining entirely and replaced it with fighting enemies instead. Of course, all this would have taken months to create and refine, and that felt like ‘too much work’ to me at the time. I was under the illusion that if your game isn’t fun in its early stages, it’ll never be fun.
I now know that making a game you’re proud of is less like avoiding the occasional obstacle, and more like carving your way through a mine. It’s all obstacles! When I build each new feature in Super Space Galaxy now, I know that I’m signing up to solving problem after problem.
Of course, I don’t doubt that if I’d persisted with it, I could eventually have overcome all these problems and turned Lone Starr into a game to be proud of. In a way, that’s what’s happened. Super Space Galaxy is a clear successor to Lone Starr, but it’s also better in ways my younger self wouldn’t have dared envisage. The controls are better, the combat is fun, and I found that I could freely use the graphics from Tyrian instead of relying on my own meagre art skills. This abandoned project turned out to be not so ‘abandoned’ after all.
Thanks for reading,
Kenneth Dunlop
Kenneth Dunlop's Game Dev Blog 