1. The Road Not Taken: Man of Steel

Superman a.k.a 'The Man of Steel' has been an icon since a long time. The poster child of DC, has entertained kids for over four or even five generations with countless comics, hundreds of episodes of animated shows, dozens of movies and uhmm.. a few 'games'.

Some memorable superman games from my childhood

You can sense a hint of disapproval for the games part, maybe even some contempt. Why is it so? Because while I liked the story and some gameplay aspects of these games, they still didn't make me 'feel' like Superman while almost every Spiderman game I have played have. At this point there even seems to be a consensus among game devs and executives on, 'Making a good Superman game is impossible' and my engineer brain will not let me accept that there is no solution to this unique problem....

Branching off topic for a bit, there have been numerous debates regarding the recent representations of Superman in media. People either like him for his original humble Kansas boy take or his rogue alien, threatening humanity take, which I think is perfectly summed up in this meme:

Now I have been a huge Superman fanboy. Been a fan of Christopher Reeve's Superman since childhood and have grown up watching his animated series. So my perfect Superman is the the humble empathetic guy who choses to be man before super. In my opinion, some of his best moments are captured in the animated series and in recent times, the CW series, Superman and Lois .

Okay fanboy. We don't really care about your love for Superman. What is this blog about and why did we waste the past two minutes reading this shit, you may ask. Well hopefully there might be a payoff. Inspired by my love for superman by recently re-watching the animated series and by the amazing reels put up in LinkedIn by some amazing game devs, in the coming days, I'm planning to undertake an adventure of my own, delving deep into the abyss of game design and try to find a solution, a blueprint (pun not intended for Unreal users) for this seemingly impossible problem.

My plan is to analyze existing games which I feel might be a good template to start off from and use various other games as references ,on the way, to develop fun and engaging gameplay while remaining true to the source material as much as possible. I will also try my best to log this game dev journey, the new skills I learn on the way and the constructive feedback I would hopefully receive.

So without much ado, let's begin!

---

Post Navigation

Part 2: Starter Trouble