Day: July 13, 2006

The Dragon’s Lair

This post on the Rampant Coyote’s blog got me thinking about the Bluth/Dyer games in general, all of which I loved despite their frustrating gameplay. So I typed “Dragon’s Lair” into YouTube.

Boy was I surprised.

All of that footage was cut from Dragon’s Lair (except the dragon fight at the end). The most intriguing to me were the scenes where there were several different possible exits from certain rooms. This footage got all the way through the animation process before being cut.

I think with that footage, a very good case can be made that Rick Dyer originally had a very different design in mind for Dragon’s Lair.

The Dragon’s Lair we got is a tightly linear game, where rooms are thrown at the player in random sequence and the player must memorize the moves necessary to beat them by rote. But the animated sequences that show Dirk leaving some scenes through alternate exits strongly suggest that the castle was originally designed to be coherent, not random. Which would have given the game an aspect of exploration and required the player to not only figure out the correct sequence of moves to get through each room, but also to figure out the best path through the castle to the dragon.

This, frankly, would have been fantastic and would have given the game much-needed depth. It also would have paved the way for future games to do the same. It’s a shame that the feature had to be cut.


Subversion

MainState.cpp: What the hell? I’m versioned! And properly backed up! And the backup is even off-site! It’s like he…he cares!

I mentioned in my Inaria postmortem that I was going to stop using my PDA for code storage/transport and set up a real Subversion server. I’d put it off because I figured I’d have to see if my web host supported it, learn how to telnet into the server, install the software, create the repository, install TortoiseSVN on my machine, and then see if it all worked.

But with me starting another new project, I figured it was time, so I went to the web configuration panel for my server space that DreamHost provides me to see if DreamHost supported Subversion servers.

Not only do they support them, but there was a button there to automatically set up an Subversion server in my web space. I clicked it, and now I have a Subversion server and all my files are properly source controlled now. I’m sure they sleep much better because of it.

MainState.cpp: Damn straight!

It has occured to me that I haven’t said enough good things about DreamHost on this site. DreamHost is fantastic. The number of problems I’ve had with them is zero. Every time I look to see if a particular feature is supported, the answer is yes. And nine times out of ten, they’ve already done the work of setting up that feature for me. I will definitely be renewing my service when it expires next year. (For the record, I have the Code Monster package.)