The Schrödingermajig does what it says on the box:
When you’re designing a game, sometimes there’s a stupid jokey idea which pops into your head and you just have to implement it to get it out of your system. Once it’s been thought it just has to be brought into being.
Such is the case of the Schrödingermajig.
Implementing it turned out to be simultaneously easy and hard.
Easy, because it just uses the same code for two players instead of one. And it doesn’t use any more sprites. It just draws each player in alternate frames, which gives a nice appropriate flickery superposition effect.
Hard, because it actually raises a whole bunch of pain-in-the-arse issues to solve. For example:
- How does the control system work? My original intention was that one player has reversed controls. But that didn’t work for a flip-screen game like this.
- What happens when a player dies?
- What happens when one player goes off screen?
- What happens when one player goes out one side of the screen, and the other goes out another side?
- How do the players reintegrate?
- How do you confine the two Schrödingermajiged players from going into areas of the map where there’s just not enough processor power to sustain updating two players? Remember, we’re targeting a 1 MHz CPU here!
- How do you set up two-player puzzles that won’t get into an unsolvable state if one player goes the wrong way?
- etc etc…
I think I’ve sorted most of these, but I’m sure I’ll be going back and tweaking and rethinking some of them.