🕹️ Before RAR: My Old (Terrible) Games

Hello everyone! 👋

In my last post about CORELOCK I mentioned, almost in passing, that RAR was not my first game: that before it I had published some other small ones, and that they were terrible.

I thought it would be nice to share them on a post, for those of you who are curious.

I want to say something before the screenshots, because I think it matters more than the games themselves: I am not posting these ironically. It would be easy to show them as a joke, the “look how bad I used to be” kind of post. But that’s not how I feel about them! These were the first things I ever finished and put in front of strangers, and finishing something is the hardest part of this whole craft… Maybe some of you can resonate with, how many things we start and never finish…

In any case, I thought of sharing.

Everyone starts somewhere… and this is my somewhere 🙂

Multijumper#

A university project, built together with some colleagues. It was the classic “jump upwards forever” game. You bounce from platform to platform, you climb, and eventually you fall and it ends. I still don’t know the proper genre name for those 😅

Nothing about it was revolutionary. But it was the first game with proper assets I ever made. Real sprites, a real HUD, coins, a distance counter… instead of coloured rectangles standing in for things. Seeing something like this move on a phone screen, in your own hand, was a feeling I can’t even describe.

It was also my first taste of building something with other people, which is a completely different skill from building alone. Funnily enough, everything since has been solo.

Snow Project#

You moved laterally, catching snow squares to grow and dodging lava squares so you wouldn’t shrink. That was the whole game!

The mechanic was thin, I’ll be honest. But what I really loved (and still love) were the backgrounds: geometric, semi-procedural, generating themselves as you played. Together with the music, there was a vibe to it that I still think about from time to time, so many years later.

This is the one I’d genuinely like to revisit. Not remake, exactly, the game around it wasn’t good enough to be worth preserving. But that visual idea deserves a better game built around it, and now that I have the foundations in place, it’s much less of a mountain than it used to be. Maybe one day 🙂

Infinite Noob#

Random shapes fall from the top. You avoid them. That was the game! 😅

I don’t have much to add, honestly. It was the simplest of the three and the one I learned the least from, but it shipped, and at that point shipping anything was the skill I was practising 🤣

Why I’m showing you these#

Two reasons.

The first is context. I haven’t always only made RAR games. I’ve always had other ideas and a real desire to try things outside that world from time to time. RAR is my main thing and will keep being my main thing. But it’s not the only thing living in my head, and CORELOCK isn’t a sudden detour. It’s the same instinct I’ve had since Multijumper.

The second is more for anyone reading this who is building their own first thing. My first three games were bad in ways I couldn’t even see at the time. I published them anyway. If I had waited until I was good enough to make something I’d be proud of, I’d still be waiting, and probably RAR I would never have existed.

Ship the “bad” one. It’s the only road to the “good” one 💪

If you haven’t played CORELOCK yet, it’s free in your browser: 👉 Play CORELOCK on the browser , and will be available soon on the Play Store!

And RAR III continues, as always, in the background! 😊

Thanks for being here! 🙏

Archison (Luis)