On ye Creation of Dragones

Once upon a time, I was told that I was going to be working on a neat project involving dragons, and a “create a block, destroy a block” mechanic similar to Solomon’s key.

Dragon Game Prototype

Read on, for the full accounting of how I got here from there, as well as such instruction as is necessary in learning “how to play”.


So. Solomon’s key, but with dragons. Could be great fun! I like dragons! And I like creating and destroying blocks! This could work!

Full of hopes and dreams, I went home for the weekend, and figured I’d give a shot at prototyping what I thought would be a neat way to represent it. “Well,” I reasoned, “Solomon’s key had some limitations about how things had to look. Everything looked square due to hardware constraints. But that was then. Why should I be similarly constrained?”

Thinking thusly, I started trying to make a dragon with some other features. I started with trying to make a tail that actually looked nice.

Several hours later, I had something pretty neat. Problem was, it was too short. So I made it longer. And longer. And longer still. Eventually, I realized that the tail was by far the coolest part of what I had done. But happily, dragons come in many shapes and sizes, at least one of which is pretty much all tail.

So. Slinky, oriental dragons it was!

This was going to be so neat, I figured. We were going to push the boundaries of what a side scroller could be. Why should the main character always fit in a bounding rect? Maybe when CPU load was a problem, but no longer! Now we’re living in the future! Even if I don’t have a flying car, I can still have an irregularly shaped protagonist!

Unfortunately, when I showed the producers in question what I hath wrought, on the following Monday, their reaction was not quite what I was hoping for. When I heard "dragons", I envisioned "slinky oriental serpents, maybe we can push the boundaries of what a side-scroller character is!", and they envisioned "square sprites that spit fire sometimes".

Oh well. They basically said “yeah, that’s kind of neat, but we would really rather just recreate Solomon’s Key…” (They went with square sprites.) Later the whole project was canceled, so it became a moot point. Oh well!


Still, I'm very happy with the effect. (You have to click through the customization screen to see the actual game. It's pretty rudimentary - Arrow keys move left, right, up. Space creates blocks. Holding down space breathes fire or something, which destroys blocks.)

It is very clearly just a prototype at the moment, mostly showing off the fluid snakey motion. I was, however, fairly proud of said motion, so that's mostly ok.

You have to click through the customization screen to see the actual game. It's pretty rudimentary - Arrow keys move left, right, up. Space creates blocks. Holding down space breathes fire or something, which destroys blocks. Having the same button breathe fire and create blocks was in response to a design request that we not go beyond d-pad + 1 button, for controls. It makes it a little cumbersome now, but it still works.

Someday, I'd like to revisit this, since I think it would make an awfully cool side scroller.