So What's the Plan?

I love the Eggerland series, and it is a darn shame that there hasn’t been any official update to the series in more than 20 years. Lolo and Lala continue to exist in some small way in the Kirby universe as Lololo and Lalala, but they’ve strayed far from their roots as masters of puzzles. The Adventures of Lolo appeared on the Nintendo Switch Online NES library, but at this point I can solve all those puzzles in my sleep.

I guess it’s up to the fans to keep the series alive. The love is still there, even if HAL has moved on. Some people share Eggerland for Windows 95 puzzles by exporting them and importing them as text files, but there could be a better solution in the current age. And there totally should be one! With the advent of services like Super Mario Maker and with the ease of access to tools like Amazon AWS, it seems like a no-brainer to me that something Mario Maker-esque is totally possible for Eggerland.

Look, I’m sure this was acceptable in 1996, but we deserve better now

We have set to work on that vision. The Adventures of Lolo has proven a surprisingly complicated game to replicate because of a ton of devilish obstacles, but our experience in everything game development has proven more than a match for anything we’ve encountered so far. We have the power, and we are working tirelessly to solve all those problems and maybe make a few improvements along the way. We’re also excited that this blog is a window into that process.

Our first aim for Eggerworld 1.0 is to produce a selection of puzzles in a functional engine. This engine will achieve what I’ll call “conceptual parity” with every Eggerland game we know of. For us that means nearly every official puzzle should be reproducible with no change to the underlying concepts behind the puzzle, and ideally with no changes to the layout at all. We’re okay with a few thoroughly-considered deviations in the name of fixes or improvements; we are making a new game, not trying to reproduce every wart.

Yes, we’re talking about you, Don

Parity is a tricky subject because behavior has changed a lot through the series. Just one example is Alma’s chasing behavior in Eggerland Mystery, Eggerland 2, and Eggerland for the FDS which is… well, bad. It gets vastly better after Eggerland for the FDS; but the point is that functional parity with Eggerland 2 is not the same as functional parity with Adventures of Lolo, nor is it the same as with Revival! Eggerland.

Every tile from each game should make an appearance in some way, all the way up to Windows 95’s Crystal Frames. Compromises will be made about functionalities that directly contradict each other, like the constantly reattempted respawn behavior in Eggerland FDS versus the one-and-done behavior in future games. One day the game will support features like entire labyrinths, but for now, conceptual parity is expected to refer to the most important part of any Eggerland game: the puzzles themselves.

So what about the future of Eggerworld? I’m hesitant to commit to concrete “plans” or a public roadmap so early on, but we do have a vision, and when the times comes we will likely share a roadmap. Modding and level editing all kinds of games has been dear to me my whole life, and one day I’d like Eggerworld to do for Lolo what Mario Maker did for Mario: provide a truly intuitive creation and distribution tool. We have designs and UMLs and proofs-of-concept ready, we are highly knowledgable in large-scale distributed software systems, and between the three of us we have 60+ years of experience with game design and software engineering and I am profoundly confident in our ability to do an amazing job.

The upper half is every tile we got working so far. The lower half is Alma, Skull, and Leeper, who are on the way; stay tuned for that blog post!

It’s tempting to try and fit everything into version 1.0, but there are realistic limitations to what we three mortals can do with the time we are given. I think it’s better to have a playable something out there for people. We’re creating totally original puzzles with the explicit goal of teaching newcomers about the series as well as appealing to expert players’ long-dormant Lolo muscles. We are prepared to make the future of Eggerworld a bright one, and we believe we are ready for this game to live a long and content-rich life, seeing support for years to come.

So you want to participate in the plan? Spread the word! Get people interested! Let’s reinvigorate the series and get a new generation pushing Emerald Frames and riding eggs and getting turned to stone. I look forward to meeting you there with an awesome game engine and a buttload of puzzles to play.