Is he re-releasing this or something? Curious why he's going back through the code.
The game Braid originally shipped to the world in 2008, and after some ports in 2009, I have only worked significantly with the code on a few occasions. But I want to maintain this game indefinitely into the future; in the back of my mind, there have always been some clean-ups that I have wanted to perform on the code. Often when shipping a game, the best answer to a problem isn’t evident, and we are under time pressure, so we solve the problem in some way that is sufficient but sub-optimal. Other times, we need to design the game to meet technical constraints of systems we want to deploy on, but as the years go on, these systems become irrelevant, so the code can be cleaned up. I figured it would be interesting to talk about some of these things in a blog (and the blog will help motivate me to think about these situations and clean some of them up!)
Game code is often (not always, and in larger studios that maybe have their own engines even less so) fire-and-forget.
I'm almost kind of jealous. :)
Throwing away never-called functions, chopping out hacks for now-outdated platforms, de-duplicating subsystems, switching to easier-to-reason-about data structures, making assets and related code use more standard formats, etc. must be pretty satisfying, like peeling old faded cracking paint off a wall and refinishing it.
I wonder where he’ll end up.
The same thing will happen with the Deadpool movie sequel. The first movie was innovative in that it was the first mainstream movie to break the fourth wall, have tons of R-rated jokes, etc, but you can only do that once.
Check out Naked Gun kiddo.
What he probably meant to say. So often we forget that literally everything is an "overdone trope" at this point, unless you do it well.
You're either very young, or haven't watched very many movies.
At least, that's the charitable interpretation that makes the claim not-laughable-on-its-face.
What's it all about, Alfie?
Depends on the sequel. If the sequel is just an additional collection of levels, then just provide a fun "additional levels pack" as an add-on, and/or provide a way to share community-produced levels. That doesn't have the same expectations as a sequel.
If you're going to actually make a sequel, put enough effort, new mechanics, and story into it to make it a new game in its own right. For examples of sequels that put enough effort in to be a new game while still feeling like a sequel to the original, look at Portal 2, or Super Mario Bros 3 (by contrast to Lost Levels, which was fundamentally just a level pack). Numerous sequels pull this off, even of innovative indie games.
But it's also possible that the new game will end up with entirely new mechanics and story to the point that it isn't a sequel, and instead becomes "a new game from the makers of ...". And that's awesome too.
I think, though, that he could come up with some new creative power-ups and such to add to the gameplay.
I keep thinking like a Mario vs Mario 3 idea. Sure it still had firepower and such, but adding the flying added a lot to the game.