Pocket*Icarus

In the video game industry (TheWingless insider tip: just call it The Industry), we have an idiom that sends chills down the spine of every engineer: feature creep. Feature Creep is the slow-but-steady accumulation of little requests and ideas and provisions and permutations until not even light can escape the mass of your once-simple idea.

On an unrelated note, let’s talk about the Pocket*Icarus on the original The Wingless site.

While learning Flash, I assigned myself projects to improve my skills – a habit I cannot encourage you enough to indulge in every day. In fact, let me made an aside: never crack open the book to learn, always dig in first. The book is there for your specific questions, but the project is there for you to comprehend. Just like the best way to learn a language is to immerse yourself in it, so to are all matters of learning.

So I assigned myself the enviable task of learning Flash by making a game. The Pocket*Icarus was to be, in theory, a Gameboy-like device that played a simple game of Pong. Nothing m-

-More was added in short order. Suddenly, there was an instruction booklet. A technical manual now, as if by magic. Do you know what’s better than one Pong game on the cartridge? Several. Put a little English on the paddles? Leaderboards? Leaderboards! The madness was all-consuming.

There were quite a few lessons learned from the Pocket*Icarus. The first: detail for the sake of detail is hardly art – a lesson that would be a brutalization in making TheWingless’ legacy site Allegiance. The second: atmosphere is not separate from substance. Atmosphere is the substance – an repeating theme in my early work where I was heavily influenced by the tone and animation of The Chapman Brothers (of Homestar Runner fame).