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The Making of Platypus - Part 2
Burning Down The House
About halfway through making the game, things got a bit more difficult when my house suddely burned down. No, really. Apparently a fire had started somewhere in the apartment downstairs - by the time I got there the whole place was a giant bonfire. Fortunately nobody was hurt, but the house completely burned down, there was literally nothing left of it in the end except for a few twisted bits of metal sitting in an enormous pile of ash. My computers were identifiable, but strangely empty - there was nothing inside the boxes. I guess the circuitry just melted away.
I had lost just about everything except the clothes I had with me, and I didn't have any insurance either, so this was all pretty annoying. About the only thing I hadn't lost was Platypus. I remember looking at the house blazing away, and feeling only relief because a few days earlier I had put all the game files on a CD and taken it around to a friend's house to show him. If I hadn't done that, Platypus would probably not exist today.
There were still other problems of course. I had lost all my computers (including the one I had just won), my camera equiptment and all my plasticine. My parents loaned me some money to buy a new computer and camera with (money that I still haven't paid back, so that pretty much makes it a gift). My friends gave me some of their clothes. Surprisingly, the plasticine was the thing that was the hardest to replace.
I just couldn't buy it anywhere. I use big blocks of the stuff, but I had to get it ordered in especially. It seemed like the country was in the middle of a great plasticine shortage, and it could be months before any more was shipped in. In the end, I went down to the local toy shop and bought as many of the little rainbow packets of plasticine as they had in stock. Then I mushed it all up together into a big, grey lump. I used this one lump, over and over, to make all of the different things you see in the finished game (I added the colour digitally, you see).
Anyway, setbacks aside, the game was eventually finished. I was reasonably happy with it, but I knew it wasn't the best I could do - for the amount I was getting paid, I couldn't afford to redo things I wasn't happy with. It had taken far too long to make as it was - the money I was paid to write it was long gone (although Idigicon did pay me an additional £500 completion bonus). But I was still quite pleased with the finished result - I had successfully competed a game, and I thought it was a pretty good effort. Platypus was duly released, where it immediately sunk to the bottom of the bargain bin, never to be seen again. I thought that was the end of it.
I was wrong. Du-duh-DUUUH!
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