Paradroid

So both of us decided that we should try to recreate Paradroid as our new development project using Unity.

Why Paradroid?

The main reason being that it’s still one of the best games ever written – and neither of us have ever come across a remake that plays or feels as good as the original.

I saw this as a good project for Tony and I to work on that would allow us to edit different areas of the game without treading on each others virtual toes.

I  started doing some work on this around 18 months ago when Tony and I talked about writing a game that was a much larger scale than Paradroid itself. At the time I was using the Paradroid maps as a start point for coding mazes, working with Tiled Map Editor, and writing the code in Swift to do this.

I had been using using Tiled for map design for a long time and found it very easy to use but at that time there was no direct importer for Swift, so I had started work on a simplified TMX importer that didn’t use graphics but rather used coordinates in the Object Layer as a basis for making my own importer. While developing this I accidentally ended up displaying a maze on the screen that actually resembled a PacMan level. Using this as inspiration, I adapted my maze test code with a player sprite that would move until it hit a wall and then added enemy sprites (ghosts) that moved around the maze, working out the players position and trying to get to him/her via reading the map data.

This eventually turned into a project we lovingly called “Waca Waca” but obviously we could never release it because of trademarks and the risk of potential court cases.

To be continued…