sgmitt is a Christmas themed platformer video game. Copyright (C) 2012 Brandon McCaig This file is part of sgmitt. sgmitt is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. sgmitt is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with sgmitt. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>. == Santa's Gotta Make It To Town (sgmitt) v0.1.1 == The game is incomplete. It's even far from complete. I'm still proud to have done what I did. I learned a little bit, made some progress, and formed some ideas for libal5poly. == What Happened? == I never really finalized or formalized the design. I wasn't sure what to do so I just sort of began one day by drawing a reindeer sprite in MS Paint (yes, that is my own work B-). I didn't have the skill to animate it (I was lucky it came out as good as it did, even though I don't think that reindeer antlers are like that) so I left it as is. At least I had something to draw in the game and work with. It got me started. For the most part I just wasn't very dedicated or motivated, I guess. I had the whole week off, minus Monday, but only spent a few days on it. Some of my best work was done in early morning hours when I was supposed to have gone to bed, but instead began hacking away at the code and couldn't walk away. I just didn't have the energy to do that all week. I knew I couldn't do a pretty job of the code if I wanted to finish (and though I still didn't finish, at least I did some things). I basically would hack away at the code in sgmitt, and once it was sort of working I'd move the more generalized concepts (pretty much verbatim) into libal5poly. Those need a lot of work still, and I'd prefer to wrap them in an interface. The interface might help me to come up with better APIs for them. In any case, libal5poly has grown slightly as a result. == What It Was Supposed To Be == Since I didn't really come up with a design at first, I got the reindeer sprite on the screen first and then began to think of ideas for a game. I decided to aim for a "whimsical platformer", though I wasn't quite sure what that would entail. I guess I was just aiming for a platformer at all. Then the reindeer automatically made me think of the song, "Run, Run, Rudolph" and I began to structure an idea around that. The concept was that somehow Santa's sleigh had crashed, the reindeer were all dead, and it was up to some kind of misfit reindeer (i.e., NOT "Rudolph") to save Christmas by getting Santa to the last town of the night in time. It was going to have a timed element to it. I hadn't decided for sure yet whether or not Santa would be riding on the reindeer's back, or being pulled behind in a sleigh, etc. Artistically I didn't think I could pull any of it off (certainly not on a tight deadline), but I could certainly imagine both ways working. So it would basically be a timed platformer. Thinking about it now I'm reminded of "Super Mario World" for the SNES, with Mario riding on a Yoshi. I suppose it could be done similarly, except that it would be Santa on a reindeer, and instead of the player being Santa it would be the reindeer. I envisioned a bloody scene for the original crash. Reindeer just broken and bleeding, etc. It would not be a kid friendly game, albeit you could easily get rid of the dark humor if so desired. I also hadn't decided whether or not the reindeer would be able to fly. I have always been facinated with flying and always loved video games that let me explore the fantasy, but most of them limit your ability to fly and I guess that's probably done to give you a challenge. I thought perhaps the ability to fly would be limited by some kind of magical dust that Santa had a very short supply of left or something. Thinking more about it now, it might even be something that Santa (i.e., AI) controls instead of you, which may or may not create an interesting dynamic for the gameplay. == To Be Continued? == As is typical with programmers, I guess, I'd like to continue on with this project and complete it someday. I think the concept is pretty good, even if it came about "automatically". I won't make any promises since we all know how that goes, but maybe I'd like to continue working on this, as well as libal5poly, and eventually get them into a completed state. Ideally also a clean code state, but I guess I should care more about the completed bit.