Plan for Paul Malyschko

I'm finding running a business is tiring work, thought it has rewarded me with improved time and project management skills. Even now, I've got four upcoming deadlines, two of which will expire by this weekend. Oh well, I didn't have any money to spend on booze, anyway.

I've decided to apply these newly found skills to my friend Toby's project, Minimum Safe Distance. It's been going around in some form since 1999, when it was on the Amiga and Toby was only a temporary coder on the project. The project fell apart, and so took up the reigns; he ported it to PC a couple years back, but since then has been bitrotting on his machine. He isn't the most driven of coders, unfortunately.

Both of us were volunteering at Free Play, so I encouraged him to show it at E3.1b (Free Play's E3-style event for indies), and ended up acting as his PR. We got a few people interested in working on it; after all, it was fun to play, it just needed a complete rewrite and better graphics and some proper gameplay.

So I've taken on design duties, to flesh out the gameplay proper, and project management duties, so it gets finished. I've been a project manager before, but always on my own idea, not somebody else's. I suppose this is the true test of the game designer - to take someone else's vision and hammer it into a workable game.

Here's a screenshot of MSD in its current form:



The current treatment says it incorporates elements of "Worms, Cannon Fodder, Tenchu, and King Arthur's World". At the moment it's just realtime Worms, so it's going to be interesting to see how I incorporate the stealth and strategy elements in.