sgmitt is a Christmas themed platformer video game.
Copyright (C) 2012 Brandon McCaig

This file is part of sgmitt.

sgmitt is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

sgmitt is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with sgmitt.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

== Santa's Gotta Make It To Town (sgmitt) v0.1.1 ==

The game is incomplete. It's even far from complete. I'm still proud to
have done what I did. I learned a little bit, made some progress, and
formed some ideas for libal5poly.

== What Happened? ==

I never really finalized or formalized the design. I wasn't sure what to
do so I just sort of began one day by drawing a reindeer sprite in MS
Paint (yes, that is my own work B-). I didn't have the skill to animate it
(I was lucky it came out as good as it did, even though I don't think that
reindeer antlers are like that) so I left it as is. At least I had
something to draw in the game and work with. It got me started. For the
most part I just wasn't very dedicated or motivated, I guess. I had the
whole week off, minus Monday, but only spent a few days on it. Some of my
best work was done in early morning hours when I was supposed to have gone
to bed, but instead began hacking away at the code and couldn't walk away.
I just didn't have the energy to do that all week.

I knew I couldn't do a pretty job of the code if I wanted to finish (and
though I still didn't finish, at least I did some things). I basically
would hack away at the code in sgmitt, and once it was sort of working I'd
move the more generalized concepts (pretty much verbatim) into libal5poly.
Those need a lot of work still, and I'd prefer to wrap them in an
interface. The interface might help me to come up with better APIs for
them. In any case, libal5poly has grown slightly as a result.

== What It Was Supposed To Be ==

Since I didn't really come up with a design at first, I got the reindeer
sprite on the screen first and then began to think of ideas for a game. I
decided to aim for a "whimsical platformer", though I wasn't quite sure
what that would entail. I guess I was just aiming for a platformer at all.
Then the reindeer automatically made me think of the song, "Run, Run,
Rudolph" and I began to structure an idea around that.

The concept was that somehow Santa's sleigh had crashed, the reindeer were
all dead, and it was up to some kind of misfit reindeer (i.e., NOT
"Rudolph") to save Christmas by getting Santa to the last town of the
night in time. It was going to have a timed element to it. I hadn't
decided for sure yet whether or not Santa would be riding on the
reindeer's back, or being pulled behind in a sleigh, etc. Artistically I
didn't think I could pull any of it off (certainly not on a tight
deadline), but I could certainly imagine both ways working.

So it would basically be a timed platformer. Thinking about it now I'm
reminded of "Super Mario World" for the SNES, with Mario riding on a
Yoshi. I suppose it could be done similarly, except that it would be Santa
on a reindeer, and instead of the player being Santa it would be the
reindeer.

I envisioned a bloody scene for the original crash. Reindeer just broken
and bleeding, etc. It would not be a kid friendly game, albeit you could
easily get rid of the dark humor if so desired.

I also hadn't decided whether or not the reindeer would be able to fly. I
have always been facinated with flying and always loved video games that
let me explore the fantasy, but most of them limit your ability to fly and
I guess that's probably done to give you a challenge. I thought perhaps
the ability to fly would be limited by some kind of magical dust that
Santa had a very short supply of left or something. Thinking more about it
now, it might even be something that Santa (i.e., AI) controls instead of
you, which may or may not create an interesting dynamic for the gameplay.

== To Be Continued? ==

As is typical with programmers, I guess, I'd like to continue on with this
project and complete it someday. I think the concept is pretty good, even
if it came about "automatically". I won't make any promises since we all
know how that goes, but maybe I'd like to continue working on this, as
well as libal5poly, and eventually get them into a completed state.
Ideally also a clean code state, but I guess I should care more about the
completed bit.
