The Indie Game Magazine September 2014 | Issue 41 | Page 10

that was practically an arcade game. I wrote down a
bunch of things I wanted: Small, very difficult, quick
to make. Then I wrote a quick scope - it’s about ten
lines - and got to work with a deadline of two weeks.
The original concept was to clone a game I’d played
a fair amount with my father as a kid, then expand
upon it and add some newer things that would then
make it more distinct. This was helped by the fact
I can’t actually remember the original game too
well, so I’ve been told there’s actually quite a fair
difference between them.
For Doktor Kale’s Creature Constructor, the
motivation was again: Make something small, quick.
I’d been making little monster sprites for a while,
motivated by @lucyamorris on Twitter asking for
monsters one night. I recalled a bunch of games
from my childhood where you’d get all these little
parts and join them together to make a creature,
monster, etc. Especially, one I played on my IIgs
called Design-a-saurus (you make custom dinosaur
skeletons). This sounded like a pretty good fit for
what I wanted, and I decided that - with a lot of
restrictions - I could make it work pretty fast.
I have a slight filtering process though - it’s
a case of “think of idea”... wait 12hrs. If I can still
remember it? It goes into the Battleplan (which is
basically a little “what games I want to make” list in
FreeMind). If I can’t