7 years ago I created a game called Perceptia for a gaming contest based off of a M.C. Escher painting. Almost immediately after I began working on a sequel. At first it used the same graphics but just had more rooms but I soon realized that I wanted to make it bigger than that. Throughout the next year it evolved from a puzzle platformer about ball to a puzzle platformer about a female fennec fox named Perceptia. It got larger and larger until it was well over 25 very large rooms. I decided to tone it down and made it into about a 7 stage open word game. But over the years the game file has become bloated: filled with useless code, sprites, objects and resources that probably accounted for 25-30% of the total game file.
I've been trying to work with it but all the extra garbage is causing no ends of problems and multiple conflicts/errors that I simply cannot fix anymore; the game file has become far too unstable to be of any use. I don't want to scrap Perceptia II; I like it way too much to allow to to fall into the garbage can with the rest of my dead games. So I'm doing the only thing I can do: I'm starting over from scratch with a new game file.
This will allow me to do several things: with no more old game files I've purchased Game Maker 8 today so I can begin programming Perceptia in it. I'll be programming it in 60 fps so it will look a lot smoother than the original and I can streamline/improve things that were impossible in the old file.
This step will mean a lot longer until Perceptia II is done, but it means that it will get done. If I had left it like it was I would almost certainly had given up in frustration. And this time, without the nuisance of a bloated and unusable game file I might actually succeed. After all, Perceptia has been waiting 7 years to rescue her family; I think that's long enough ;D
Ablach Blackrat's blog
Oct '10
10
Comments
Oct '10
10
Yes. This is exactly what I did for UA; it was originally a bloated, buggy GM5 game, so I stripped it bare, started again in GM6 then 7, at 60FPS, not 30. Best decision ever - it will SAVE you time and effort in the long run, and improve the end result! Good call.
Oct '10
10
I just realized that now I can program is using OGG music instead of WAV. Perfect. I can't believe people still use WAV files in their games.
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