Sigh, how frustrating some days are, but the newly updated Roton is now complete. I dashed through the morning, adding the new main loop and fixing up high score tests and other minor things. At 10:30, I set up a new television for mum after she spectacularly smashed the old one (I say old, it was less than 6 months old).
At 11 I got back to Roton, and created a new icon, and slightly tweaked the title graphics, from...
to...
The new icon was a bit of a pain, as I had nothing near 256 pixels wide (that was probably a huge size in 1999). Then, some playing and trying to address a weird bug where the wrong text kept appearing. I think it was due to the high scores, as resetting them fixed it, but I'm still unsure what caused it. Then lots of final updates; updating the itch channel, and creating a fancy pdf manual, which itself took over an hour.
I just had to make it look its best, I had to make a print quality manual, had to remaster the audio and update the graphics, but I feel that it's as much as waste of my time today as it was then. As a game, Roton is not very good. It starts very slowly, is actually rather boring for the first five or ten minutes, but becomes exciting (if repetitive) at around level 20. There are few noteworthy parts apart from the variety of enemies, and the occasional space invader. I could do so much better now; so it goes the familiar trope of my life! Toying with old and poor things in a a semi-frustrated state, when I know that I can make new things that are a thousand times better - yet those will remain forever unseen by the world. I don't make games anymore, so the whole experience of these remasters is a cycle of frustration and angst.
Still, my goal here isn't to make a good game, but to make available an old one which, without me, would be vanished forever. I thought, while playing, how Roton Amiga, from 1992 is about my anxiety and frustration of those days. I clearly remember working on it while a part-time office employee at Mediaware, a computer parts company. The villains in the game include floppy discs and lightbulbs, and other odd things, and the only aim is to face more and more of them until you can't cope and are consumed by them; buried, swamped, drowned to an ultimate and futile death. The unstoppable attacks from my father taught me that fighting was futile in this way.
A last few tweaks to this ancient game have taken hours, but hopefully it's all done now. My plan was to also update Martian Rover Patrol for similar reasons. Will I find that experience as frustrating and pointless? Yes. I could simply put it in my will that the source code can be released for someone else to fix! That's the lazy option. Really, I should, if I had the time, the resources, the care, be making new and genuinely imaginative games, but then, why, when I feel more at home painting, a medium which is easy to master and evident for all to see?
At these times I feel like a van Gogh of games, with the crucial difference that my games were rubbish... yet, no game is perfect and it's good that I can be critical and objective - critique proves that one has improved. Perhaps the greatest benefit of my programming years was the accretion of mental ability, of patience and problem solving skills, and the organisational skills that are necessary to learn to program, to make game art, to make the music. I would be a different person without the games. A normal person. I'm anything but that now.
