As I mentioned in my first post, I started a project to write a short story based on my Christmas Carol Intellivision game. It is something I've been wanting to do for the past six years. You see, that game was much more than a silly Pac-Man clone to me, it was an experience: not only was it my very first video game (which was a huge accomplishment for me, The World's Greatest Procrastinator), but it involved much more than writing code.

I love Christmas. It reminds me of my childhood, and I still try to keep its magic alive by maintaining my family traditions and coming up with my own ones. Plus, I've been blessed with a wife who is equally inspired by the Christmas Spirit, so we tend to go all out for Christmas -- we celebrate the season from December 1st (I refuse to move it earlier, no matter what the stores and advertisements say!!!), all the way to ... er, February? March? sometimes April. Yup. Christmas finally ends when my wife makes me takes down the increasingly decaying tree and disassemble the Lego train running around it.

Anyway, I digress ... where was I? Oh yes, Christmas Carol: The Experience.

So, it was no accident that I chose a Christmas theme for my game. (Well, it was sort of out of the blue, sure, but I still contend that the same circumstances would never had happen at any other time of the year, and I certainly would not have been as inspired or motivated by any other season.)

One consequence of that motivation is that the game was not just a collection of game mechanics and 8-bit graphics. I built a silly and whimsical world in my head and every element in the game had to fit within. It started as a small thing (just an elf, some presents, then a ghost) and then it just grew into a larger world. An entire story and mythology formed in my mind, and as the game progressed and got bigger, it reflected this growing magical world.

Sure, because it started as a Pac-Man clone, some things were there because of the work I had done already. However, even those things like the Pac-Man maze, dots, and power-pellets had to fit within the Christmassy world in which Carol lived. I had to find a way in which they fit, or else I would take them away. That was my rule.

So the maze became an ice cube cavern; the dots, candy; and the power-pellets, magical snowflakes. Some may think that these were just simple translations or placeholders for the sake of the theme, but they were much more than that. You see, it wasn't just a maze with dots and power-pellets any more: Carol Greenleaf was an elf with a sweet-tooth who loved candy, she was on a mission to save Christmas, exploring the dark and scary Ice Cube Caverns, which were imbued with some ancient magic that manifested as glowing snowflakes. There's quite some depth in that.

Anyway, that's enough for this post. I'll continue with this topic on the next one.

-dZ.