Monorun! is a minimalistic game about the transience of life. As the nucleus of an atom, it’s your purpose to stay positive for as long as you can. Avoid those negative electrons.
Or at least that’s what it says on the website. I should know, I wrote it. But I’m getting ahead of myself — as I have a habit of sometimes doing — we should take this from the very, very beginning. Which was only last week, so it’s not like we have to travel that far back into the past.
Last week, whilst beije and I were chatting on Skype, we got to talking about the fact that my blog was, back then, about to turn 5 — which I talked about ‘til the cows came home, here — and in the midst of that conversation beije started going through his old blog posts to find his earliest writing. Whilst doing that he also stumbled on this thing he had made back in June, 2010. What is essentially was/is, is beije recreating another game he himself had found — back then — recently. I couldn’t remember the game anymore, so of course I had to try it out and for some strange reason it just spoke to me.
Yeah, I heard how that sounds.
But it did. The movement of the “enemy” squares were just so energetic and full of life, despite the fact that it was just a few colored blocks chasing another colored block. So, I instantly — remember, we were chatting on Skype — shouting out that we have to make this into an actual game. Now even though I say actual game, I don’t mean to say that his prototype wasn’t a game. In all fairness, with a beginning and a clear end, it’s about as much a game as Skyrim. Maybe not as pretty though.
Beije added that I would need to figure of a “story” for this “game”.
One thing led to another, and a plan was born. Create a game from start to finish over a weekend. Create a game in a week or two. Turned out we boat both had plans which meant we had to forgo the original plan. Keep it simple and focused. Design and develop all of it openly by hosting everything on GitHub from the start. No monetization. Avoid Feature Creep. That last one is always a bit “wishful thinking” but one can always strive to avoid Feature Creep so it’s a good goal to include.
It’s also good that beije — who himself has plenty of shit ideas — calls me out, on my shit ideas. Like this turd of a marketing-bullshit explanatory text;
Monorun! An open-source, device agnostic, browser game designed and developed during the course of a few days.
Beije’s comment was that if I could just squees in “Cloud-based” there somewhere, it would be perfect. He was obviously being sarcastic, and how right he was because the next version was much closer to the current one we have, which is both more honest and more “with a sense of purpose”.
We’re not done yet but I’m super-excited so it shouldn’t be long now, but I’ll be sure to write another post when we are, and for now I will leave you with the link to the landing page for monorun!