When making a game, one thing you have to decide early on is what you will use as units. Having a game unit allows you to consistently express things like distances and speeds. Below, you can see the units I use for Super Retro Crossover. Since the world is split up into tiles, 1 unit is equal to 1 tile (16 pixels).

Having a unit that makes sense and is easy to wrap your head around is important. For example, if I tell you that Mario’s max walk speed is 5.625 game units per second, can you imagine how fast that will be in your head? With the units I’ve chosen, it’s pretty easy. He’ll move past about 5 and a half tiles every second.

Units shouldn’t always have a direct relation to pixels though. For example, one unit is equal to 16 pixels now, but if I wanted more detailed graphics, one unit might equal 32 pixels or 64 pixels. It’s generally a good idea to think of rendering as separate from the rest of the game engine.

I’m telling you all of these things because I did them wrong in Super Mario Bros. Crossover. In that game, one unit was equal to half a pixel. Look how much more confusing this is!

I implemented sprite flipping in the level editor and game engine. The image above shows flipping on hill. Those are both the same sprite.

I also built the first level of Super Mario Bros. There is a toad there because the story takes place after Mario beats Bowser, so he has freed the toads.

Speaking of that… does anyone have any ideas for how the first level would be different after Mario has beaten Bowser? So far I just have toads hanging around that you can talk to, there are no enemies, and some of the bricks and item blocks have already been hit. I was wondering if there could be anything else different to make it more interesting to go through the level. It’s important for the story that the player goes through the whole level.

I got rotation working.

And scaling.

I had some weird problems along the way.

This is the first post of the Super Retro Crossover development log. More info here.

Haha, aw.

http://blazehedgehog.tumblr.com/post/79919458049/53-000-well-spent

That’s not really a “thought-piece”, though, that’s more me being snarky.

The only thing I’d have to say is if I was in that guy’s shoes, and in that situation I don’t think suspending development was a smart idea. When you run a Kickstarter, people are giving you money and intend to get a product or service in return. People contributed to Shovel Knight, and next month, they will receive their copy of Shovel Knight.

They do not give a person money as a license to goof around and ultimately not produce anything. Imagine you go to the produce section of a market, you give somebody $5 for a pound of apples, and then they tell you “Sorry, I don’t know how to grow apples. I’ll get back to you after I’ve worked on a farm for a couple years.”

You’d be pretty mad, right? You should be pretty mad. I was going to make an apple pie tonight with those!

As cold as it sounds, the producer’s personal feelings don’t actually matter. It’s a job. The exchange of money is almost like signing a contract. You are now bound to deliver on your promises, or else you are going to be in some deep, deep trouble (one way or the other).

Think of it like an actual job. When you work at an office or whatever, you only get a certain number of “sick days”, because it’s to encourage you to power through whatever dumb problems you’re suffering through and not waste all of your time with “I can’t come to work today because I don’t feel like it.”

He did not do his job, and he did not do it in the most spectacularly awful way possible. Shelving the idea until he has enough experience to pull it off is literally the worst move he could have made in this scenario. Yes, he said he’s going to come back to it, but he also said a lot of things that never came to pass. Nobody should trust that man, because there’s already a growing list of promises he’s unfulfilled.

He was a moron lured by the temptation of free money without thinking for a moment how to budget or plan what he was going to do with it. And the people who gave him money are now S.O.L. because Kickstarter offers no accountability for this kind of stuff.

One more reminder that this guy received $53,000 more than a year and a half ago in order to make a game that, as of today, is a bunch of hitboxes and a single debug level.

"We're just starting with the basics," he says, despite the fact his Kickstarter ended in July of 2012. Meanwhile, I made the sprites and coded three entire games in six months (not especially long or complex games, but still).

Putting out a video of showing the "game" in this state is like me working all night for one night and then posting about it in the morning (oops).

This is a pretty significant reminder that people gave this guy money to make a game.

I'd never really done... game design, before? I mean, the stuff in [Super Mario Bros. Crossover] I did, but that was all kind of laid on top of something that was already there. It wasn't starting from scratch. So when you're designing a game from scratch, you pretty much have... infinite possibilities. I mean, you do. Well, sort of. Like, anything that's possible to experience through a controller... and... a screen, you can do that. So you have quite a lot of... options. So it's really easy to get stuck... just thinking about all of the possibilities and "oh, I wanna make the best game ever!" And you're like, "Oh I want the character to fly and get all these power-ups that change him in to different things, and all these enemies and bosses..."

It's really easy to design too much stuff that you don't know what to do with. And another problem is with having so many options is you might never make up your mind. You can be like, "We're gonna make a platformer, and we're gonna have some different characters." And who are these characters? I want... all the characters to be really different, but then you're like, "I don't know how to do that. I want all the characters to be pretty similar. What should they have in common?" You can keep getting yourself in to these loops, where you're like, oh the characters being so different isn't working out, let's have them be the same. But then you're like, they're too similar, it's boring. Then you're gonna be like, "I want it to be different again." That's just like, one example? The point I'm trying to make is that you need to pick a direction. Maybe the direction you pick isn't even the best one ever. But what does that mean? If you have infinite possibilities, is one of them really the best one? Or, are all of them the best and you just have to pick one and make it the best? So, that was one thing I realized a few weeks ago. I picked a direction and we're going for it.

And doing a Kickstarter, having backers... that ended up being a lot different than I thought it would be. I kinda learned right away that once people give you money they treat you a lot differently. Cuz like, they've... given you something? And they want something in return. Even if you're doin' your best. And no matter what you do for them, it's not good enough. So if you do a Kickstarter, crowd-funding thing, expect to deal with people... not being happy with you.

So I don't mean to harp on this guy yet again, but this video really makes it sound like his Kickstarter plan was to ask for a bunch of money first and figure the rest out after his pockets were full.

It has been a year and a half since his Kickstarter ended and he hasn't shown anything for it. Judging by what he says in this video, he's just been kind of screwing around for the last year and a half and only just now picked a direction for the game. That's not even touching on how it sounds like he completely mismanaged the game's budget.

$50,000 for basically nothing. Meanwhile, you have Freedom Planet, which ended at half that cost, and in 11 months has had screenshots, video, and a frequently-updated playable demo. What has the Super Mario Bros. Crossover guy done?