Designing the Joystick Johnny Interface

June 2005 - Prototype

Joystick Johnny began as an entry for Game-in-a-Day, to see if I could build a framework for creating small retro games quickly.

That weekend, I created 24 simple minigames with one level each. The games were in one long row and the goal was to finish them all before time ran out.

From this prototype, I decided it was worth eventually building into a full game. But as I mentiooned earlier, I wanted to come up with a way to tie the games together into a more interesting metagame.

A year later, I got the chance to work on it full-time.