In an industry notorious for neglecting its past, one developer is trying to make a game that will be playable (and enigmatic) long into the future
Mon 1 Aug 2022 10.00 BST: a fully functional “Arwing” fighter from another classic Nintendo game, Star Fox 64. The Arwing was added as a programmer’s shortcut to, essentially, teach a dragon how to fly. Once the dragon was airborne, the ship was hidden away in Ocarina of Time’s source code, where hackers unearthed it 22 years later.
While Animal Well’s winding subterranean geography recalls Metroid, interactions with creatures riff on the whimsical item puzzles of point-and-click adventures such as Monkey Island, albeit with several different solutions per puzzle. Some are fairly obvious: dogs go well with Frisbees, for instance. Others, Basso hopes, will take years to unravel. Animal Well is a single-player game, but players may still need to collaborate, even if it’s only by trading theories on forums and social media.
Animal Well, by contrast, is built to last. “If I’m doing puzzles that maybe take 10 years to solve, I want the game to be playable 10 years from now.” The game doesn’t rely on third-party tools such as Unity that may lose compatibility over time, and Basso may ultimately host it himself rather than leaving it at the mercy of a digital store such as Steam.
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