The uDevGame Contest, an amateur game programming contest hosted by iDevGames, has posted a postmortem report on one of its contest's winning entries, Raptor-Air Superiority Fighter. The author, Holmes Futrell, describes the creative process, his collaboration with a number of his friends to make the game, and his development through a completely new IDE (Integrated Development Environment) to him, TNT Basic.

My approach to making Raptor followed a pattern something like this: I would ask myself, "I wonder if I could program a scrolling landscape made from map tiles." Then I'd do it. Then I'd say to myself, "That's pretty cool, I wonder if I could add a plane that flies around." Then, of course, I'd do that. Afterwards, being very proud, I'd ask myself if I could program a map object of a cloud and have it be read from the map file into the spawning code. The process would continue for a long time. Since I didn't even know what I was programming would become, there was no chance of me producing a design document.

Raptor Postmortem

Download Raptor (9.7mb)

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