BELTRUNNER: game design postmortem

Last week I shared a look at an arcade-faithful version of Asteroids to demonstrate the totally new way of making games that I’ve been working on. It’s called Jinks and it’s a lightweight game-engine, interactive development environment, and a language of sorts. This post is a game design postmortem for BELTRUNNER, an original game built from the same bones of Asteroids. Roughly 1,300 lines for a whole game you can finish. Built on the same system, in same succinct language, with all the same nicities, though I’ll continue to stay a little coy about the machinery for now, mostly because things are still changing so much every day. Things need to settle down so I can describe what it is rather than what it used to be. What I do want to talk about are the design methods that made it in, the ones that didn’t, and the bits the system had to grow so the game could exist. A lot of the methods are old, which is the point. Explorations The prototype was nothing like Asteroids at all. I built…