My friend Dave and I have long been fans of Pokey the Penguin comics. (Indeed it seems that we have been members of International Pokey Appreciation Society since 2002.) It is a crudely drawn surrealistic comic about a Penguin who strangely lives in the Arctic (not the Antarctic) and has various absurd friends and adventures.
Some years ago Dave and I wanted to make a game, and were inspired by Pokey. We conceived of an environment with small icebergs or floes floating on the sea. The original gameplay was to involve 2 characters standing on opposite shores of a channel, who would harpoon floes and use a rope to drag them to their side, perhaps thereby acquiring the treasures which are naturally found on all ice floes. There was also the potential of breaking the floes using the harpoon, or harpooning the opposing player’s ropes, or some similar mechanics.
We did actually start some work on a prototype, but quickly lost momentum. This is a serious problem for us. We have had many great and ambitious ideas which have succumbed to the friction of everyday life. But now the project has been resurrected! For in the intervening time I have learned OpenGL, and developed a nice game framework suited for just this kind of simple game. I recently started a new prototype, and this is what I have so far:
In subsequent posts I’ll explain what I’m trying to achieve and some of the techniques I’m using. Also on my Projects Index you can find a link to a page where you can download the latest test builds of the program.
