Before we can understand game development, it helps if we look at some examples of quality titles. Today we’ll be looking at the classic arcade title known as Root Beer Tapper.
My experience with Root Beer Tapper was pretty fun for the most part. The beginning can be a struggle, arcade mechanics aren’t all the straight-forward after all. Take, for example, the bar tenders ability to seemingly teleport to the tap stations. A mechanic that must be learned by the player and isn’t readily explained. Once I got the hang of the mechanics, I was enjoying my time. The expressive character models and animations as paired well with the catchy music. This is an absolute classic.
The game is easy in the beginning but it very quickly ramps up in difficulty, I made it to only round 4 before I was overwhelmed with thirsty root-beer drinkers. You’d be forgiven for speculating on the relative difficulty of these types of titles. Arcade games were intentionally designed to be difficult to get more coins out of players and also to extend the length of the game during a time where game development was limited to short and repetitive gameplay loops.
Playing on an emulator is actually awesome, it almost feels like cheating in some ways. You almost feel powerful being able to rebind control settings on your keyboard. I’m sure some prefer the novelty of playing on an original arcade machine but there are advantages to be had using the emulator, even if some of the game instructions are left a little confusing with respect to emulation controls.
Dev's Game Dev 