{"id":797,"date":"2012-09-27T11:20:57","date_gmt":"2012-09-27T15:20:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/?p=797"},"modified":"2022-07-01T16:33:41","modified_gmt":"2022-07-01T20:33:41","slug":"gold-leader-inspirations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/2012\/09\/gold-leader-inspirations\/","title":{"rendered":"Gold Leader: Inspirations"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em><a href=\"http:\/\/rocketshipgames.com\/games\/goldleader\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-799\" title=\"goldleader-icon\" src=\"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/goldleader-icon.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"100\" height=\"100\" \/><\/a>This is part of a planned series of notes on the development of\u00a0<\/em><a href=\"http:\/\/rocketshipgames.com\/games\/goldleader\/\">Gold Leader<\/a><em>, currently being shopped around to game portals.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>There are really three inspirations for <em>Gold Leader<\/em>. \u00a0One is somewhat obviously mid-90s shooters like <em><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Raptor:_Call_of_the_Shadows\">Raptor: Call of the Shadows<\/a><\/em> and <em><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Tyrian_(video_game)\">Tyrian<\/a><\/em>, both of which I played a lot of as a kid. \u00a0For what it&#8217;s worth, I am more of a Raptor guy. \u00a0It just felt like a much more realized universe; I loved flying over forest clearings and riverbanks discovering little roads, buildings, trucks, and so on.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_800\" style=\"width: 330px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/raptor.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-800\" class=\"size-full wp-image-800\" title=\"raptor\" src=\"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/raptor.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"320\" height=\"200\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/raptor.png 320w, https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/raptor-300x187.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 320px) 100vw, 320px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-800\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Raptor: Call of the Shadows.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>More immediately, I randomly came across a really good spritesheet on a stock art website. \u00a0That&#8217;s almost entirely what you&#8217;re seeing when you play <em>Gold Leader<\/em>. \u00a0I hadn&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, my wife started reading <em>Ender&#8217;s Game.<\/em>\u00a0 I am actually not a fan of the book in practice. \u00a0It&#8217;s immensely popular for precisely the reasons I dislike it:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The characters and their interactions are all fairly simple and predictable. \u00a0There&#8217;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.<\/li>\n<li>It&#8217;s power pornography, a fantasy for every downtrodden nerd out there. \u00a0The repeated narrative of the story is: Ender encounters some insurmountable problem. \u00a0Ender whines about how insurmountable the problem is. \u00a0Ender applies his limitless abilities to surmount the problem. \u00a0Wash, rinse, repeat&#8230;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So, I think most of the actual text is boring and annoying. \u00a0But many of the concepts are great, and I really like it in theory. <strong>**SPOILER ALERT**<\/strong> I&#8217;m particularly fascinated by Ender&#8217;s closing realization that he&#8217;s been consigning real people to their deaths the whole time, let alone just wiped out a whole civilization. \u00a0The 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. \u00a0<strong>**END SPOILER ALERT**<\/strong><\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_801\" style=\"width: 205px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/endersgame.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-801\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-801\" title=\"endersgame\" src=\"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/endersgame-195x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"195\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/endersgame-195x300.jpg 195w, https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/endersgame.jpg 480w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 195px) 100vw, 195px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-801\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Gold Leader&#8230; ?!?!<\/p><\/div>\n<p>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\u00a0<em>Gold Leader.<\/em>\u00a0 Looking back it&#8217;s almost kind of funny: I&#8217;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&#8217;ve got a game!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is part of a planned series of notes on the development of\u00a0Gold Leader, currently being shopped around to game portals. There are really three inspirations for Gold Leader. \u00a0One 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. \u00a0For &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/2012\/09\/gold-leader-inspirations\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":800,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[398],"tags":[96,277],"class_list":["post-797","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-game-design","tag-gold-leader","tag-videogames"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=797"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":808,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797\/revisions\/808"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}