Rebuilding The Perfect Beast
Creating a sequel to Donkey Kong
By Jeff Kulczycki

Owning my own Donkey Kong arcade game is a dream-come-true for me. It sits proudly in my basement gameroom for me to play whenever I want. The only problem I have with the game is that it only has four levels. And even though I enjoy playing them, the repetition can get old quick. When I see the screen that says, “How high can you go?”, I can’t help but think: “I wish I could go higher!” So I decided to solve this problem by creating a series of new levels to kick a little excitement back into this classic game.

I created four new levels in all--The Foundry, The Mixer, The Refinery, and The Incinerator. There was also a partial fifth level, called The Crane, but it never panned out. Designing and building the new levels to be fun and playable was no small task. It took a lot of iterations and trial-and-error to get things just right. Below I’ll walk you through the design and development stages of each of the new levels.

THE FOUNDRY
The Foundry level was the first new level that I created. I didn’t have any particular design in mind when I started it. The level just came about by chance as I was moving girders around and experimenting with different sprites. I wanted to show that by simply changing the location, color, and behavior of existing elements that I could create a new level with a whole new look.

The main elements in the Foundry are what I call sliders. The sliders are just elevator sprites that move left and right instead of up and down. They came about by doing some minor modifications to the code from the Elevator level. That same code also had to be expanded to handle more sprites because originally it only handled 6 sprites and I now needed 16. After playing with it for a while I came up with the speed, spacing, and direction that seemed to create the best challenge.

One difficult thing about playing the Foundry is that if you don’t time your jumps right you’ll hit your head on the sliders above. This overhead hazard was not intentional. It just so happened that during development I placed a girder too close to the sliders. I was going to lower the girder in order to avoid the collision, but after playing the level, I realized that it created a unique challenge. So I left it alone.

For the fireballs, I wanted to do something different. I thought it would be cool to have the fireballs shoot out at you rather than have them chase after you. The shooting fireballs created a vertical element to compliment the horizontal element of the sliders. The trajectory for the fireballs was an approximated arch that was stored in a data table. When the fireball reached the top of the trajectory, the sprite was flipped over and reversed back through the data table.

For the final touches on this level, I added some stationary girders for the final jumps to the lady. They were slightly offset just for visual effect. I also added some crosshatching background to add some accents to the fireball paths. And for one last tweak, I adjusted the fireballs to go a little bit higher so that I can catch Jumpman’s heels while he’s on the top sliders.

(The following photos show the level as it progressed through the production stages)





Click here to move on to the The Mixer!




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