Game Design History

1. Question: Imagine that you are a level designer working in the 1980s. Knowing the
limitations associated with this era, what type of game would you develop?


Answer: I would develop a game that incorporated the side scrolling sprite games, a good example would be The Super Mario Bros. series which was an all time favourite for players during that era. I would be aware of the limitations and try not to be extravagent on details and story details.


Originally I would of gone for the text based games, which requires the players to type the actions of their characters with the corresponding environment, and text based games take up less CPU usage than the sprite based games. So on second thoughts I would choose the sprite game concept as it is easier for the possible player(s) to be able to be fully aware of what is happening with their character in the environment, and the game would get more points for visuals rather than text based games.


However I would not steal the unique idea of using plumbers as heroes that rescue a princess from a what would be turtle whilst collecting coins and stomping on small turtles and enemies that look like angry mushrooms with feet. Instead I would have characters that used powers over the elements, like fire, water, earth, air, shaow and light. Though this may have been tricky this would of been easily achieved through the pixels as each power would have a key colour to identify it, and would have some challenging parts to the game which would make the player think on how to overcome it.