Category Archives: game design

Gold Leader: Inspirations

Posted on by tjkopena

This is part of a planned series of notes on the development of Gold Leader, currently being shopped around to game portals.

There are really three inspirations for Gold Leader.  One is somewhat obviously mid-90s shooters like Raptor: Call of the Shadows and Tyrian, both of which I played a lot of as a kid.  For what it’s worth, I am more of a Raptor guy.  It just felt like a much more realized universe; I loved flying over forest clearings and riverbanks discovering little roads, buildings, trucks, and so on.

Raptor: Call of the Shadows.

More immediately, I randomly came across a really good spritesheet on a stock art website.  That’s almost entirely what you’re seeing when you play Gold Leader.  I hadn’t seen anybody else use it, there were just enough components to make a full game, and I really loved the look of it so I started thinking about building a game around it.

Finally, my wife started reading Ender’s Game.  I am actually not a fan of the book in practice.  It’s immensely popular for precisely the reasons I dislike it:

  • The characters and their interactions are all fairly simple and predictable.  There’s a reason good young adult fiction is so popular with adults: Just complex enough to be engaging, not complex enough to really require thinking.
  • It’s power pornography, a fantasy for every downtrodden nerd out there.  The repeated narrative of the story is: Ender encounters some insurmountable problem.  Ender whines about how insurmountable the problem is.  Ender applies his limitless abilities to surmount the problem.  Wash, rinse, repeat…

So, I think most of the actual text is boring and annoying.  But many of the concepts are great, and I really like it in theory. **SPOILER ALERT** I’m particularly fascinated by Ender’s closing realization that he’s been consigning real people to their deaths the whole time, let alone just wiped out a whole civilization.  The brief moment he spends at the end pondering the faith and duty of the ships and crew that have been blindly following his often counter-intuitive and suicidal orders largely redeems the whole book for me.  **END SPOILER ALERT**

Gold Leader… ?!?!

Those three just happened to impact together in my head, and I started thinking about a narrative and backstory driven by some of those themes, and slowly started working on Gold Leader.  Looking back it’s almost kind of funny: I’ve got a great spritesheet featuring a little gold player spaceship, I see a book laying around the house with a little gold spaceship on it, next thing you know we’ve got a game!

More Ancient History: Space Marines!

Posted on by tjkopena

I also stumbled across this while cleaning up one of my web dumps: My most successful experiment with sculpting and casting a game piece.

The original “little dude.”

It’s, you know, pretty terrible.  The simplicity could actually work well, but the sculpt wasn’t smoothed over and evened out enough so he’s kind of lumpy and rippled. He was actually made out of Sculpey clay rather than green stuff, for no real reason than that I had a ton of it. He stands about 3/4″ tall, the biggest problem with the Sculpey being that it shrinks a bit in baking. A small plastic army man stood in for the original armature, deeply buried in the final shape.

Still, though, he actually looks awesome.  He’s wearing a cool little backpack you can’t see that came out pretty well. Most importantly, he worked great as a game piece looked at from table height and wound up the player piece in Relic Hunter.  The small, cartoonish shape to him worked great for its atmosphere and became one of its defining symbols.

Cast pieces. The guy on the right is in a vaguely Imperial Stormtrooper inspired paint job…

To support that I wound up casting dozens and dozens in Alumilite.  Eventually a bunch of the copies were cleaned up and themselves made into a 5-piece mold so I could cast them like gangbusters. At one point we had so many of them, Daryl and I could fight over design decisions by throwing fistfuls at each other.  I cast them up in 5 different colors, one for each possible player, and they drifted around into the corners of my apartment like confetti.  Some of them got some minimal paint jobs and were inevitably fought over in playtesting.

The mold from the original piece.

I forgot to put release powder on the first half of the mold before pouring the second, so it had to be cut and ripped apart and hence looks like a mess. Still worked well though for what felt like a long run of casts.