Chris Crawford on Game Design

Implementation Woes

I had just taken on a summer intern for my group; my intention had been to let him poke around with the other members of the group, helping out as possible. He had great skills as a graphics programmer and this little design needed nothing more than some graphics tacked onto it. Well, yes, it would have to be converted from BASIC to assembly language, but it was such a short program that I anticipated no problems. So I assigned the Gossip project to the summer intern.

Things went swimmingly at first. He had the game screen up and running in no time. There were eight people in two rows across the screen, each one shown with head and upper torso only (see Figure 19.1). They looked rather like the panelists on a game show. The ...