TL;DR

I took a look back at an old project, described in Kasai!.

I remember when a lot of my time was spent over re-creating a prototype for old hand-held games from my childhood. What I didn’t remember until a few minutes ago was that it more or less happened in coincidence with my resolution to write one post per day back at the end of 2019.

It does not surprise me: I was probably looking for something different to do after proving myself that I could put up a workable prototype.

I can, anyway, provide some of the then sought feedback to the past me, which I hope will be sufficiently constructive.

1. Dumping a lot of code without even a README.md in the repository is the best way to get something ignored and higly disrespectful of whoever you could happen to be talking to. Pile on with a systematic (systemic?) lack of documentation and we’re set up for failure. Admittedly, I can think that the blog post served the role of the README.md and that the lack of documentation for the code does no harm to people who just want to try out the game.

2. The timing approach seems weird and needs some reworking. When the game speeds up, so does the pause after a miss and I sort of remember that this was not the experience at the time (like two beeps, the savers flashing together with the missed person). Also, acceleration through the game might be smoother.

3. There does not seem to be any mechanism to get lives back, which seems to go against memory.

4. Overall I enjoyed playing the game again, though, so it’s a nice prototype. I would like to see different combinations, as well as games of type B (together with people going down from the lower floor too).

There you go, past me! Well… I guess that in lack of past me, I’ll have to read and use this beautiful feedback… or ignore it for another three years and some.

Stay safe!