As I mentioned in my previous post, my next project is making a remake of Ruins of Time, my first “serious” game.

Why am I doing this again? Well, my creative juices are kinda dry… A bit too dry to come up with interesting experimental games… So I want to tackle something simpler first: remaking an old game of mine using my current skills (an idea I got thanks to the Remake Jam), hopefully with an interesting twist. I also want to take the chance to focus less on design and more on technical/process aspects.  Let’s hope it helps!

Ideas for the remake

Faded Backgrounds

Talking about aesthetics, I’m not 100% decided on the style yet, but something I’ve been seeing lately and want to try my hand at is faded backgrounds (like these images). There’s this simple, melancholic but inviting look that I really like. Not entirely sure how I’ll manage to create it… but figuring it out is part of the fun!

Use HacknPlan

I’ve been a big fan of Trello ever since I started making longer projects, but an alternative I discovered quite a while ago is HacknPlan, a project management tool designed for game development. From what I’ve seen, it looks like a really good and well designed app, but I haven’t had the chance to try it out properly (AKA haven’t worked on a longer project in quite a while). This probably won’t be that long of a project either (I think…) so it feels like a good excuse to try it out!

Learn Github

Source control is one of those things I’ve always appreciated the importance of, but never really learned well , particularly since I’ve rarely worked in a serious team environment. But I’d like to learn it! Git and the command window has always kinda intimidating, but not so long ago I tried the GUI version for Windows and it was great. I wanna try applying that to a game, and now seems like a good chance. Since I have a free account though.. my code will be public! Have no idea if anyone will want to look at it, but it’s interesting (and pressures me to write cleaner code :p ).

Side-scroller to top-down

Last but definitely not the least! I still wanted to make a decision that was interesting design-wise, so I asked myself what interested me lately… and I’m interested in top-down perspective in 2D games (kinda tired of platformers to be honest…). So why not try to remake Ruins of Time as top-down puzzler? I’m not sure yet how it’ll work… but it sounds like a challenge that involves thinking (but not as much as creating from scratch), and that’s cool.

So these are the main points I’ll be focusing on the remake, but I’m just starting with the planning. No idea how long I’ll take, but I hope to have something showable soon!