2007. Taste the word. It hints of futuristic worlds and scientific advances unthought of just ten years ago. But at the same time it’s mundane and common – it’s simply the year we live in right now. And was ten years really such a long time ago? That’s what I asked myself when I found an old zip archive called FirstProg.zip. Granted, it’s definitely not a complete colllection of my first programming experiences: I dabbled with game and demo programming on the C-64 and Amiga before this. But some of my earliest PC projects were found in this archive! Let me show you a little bit of what I found. I’ll begin with a vague timeline:

• Pre-1996: I messed with C-64 and Amiga hobby projects of various types, such as an Amiga fighting game called Time Fighters. I actually received some praise for it – it had a much better control scheme than the over-hyped Body Blows. Not that that says much.
• Spring 1996: I bought my neighbour’s 40 MHz 486 PC. This was my first real experience with x86 computers, and I quickly learned the joys of having an incredible amount of RAM to use in Fast Tracker II, compared with the limitations of an Amiga. At first I had all of 4 MB RAM, but I soon upgraded it to a massive 16 MB!
• Autumn 1996: I heard rumours about an assembly programming group at my high school, and soon joined the four other students interested in diving into the mysteries of x86 ASM. Soon after I had gotten a copy of Turbo Assembler I created this:

I intended to do a very straight-forward Space Invaders clone, but due to sloppy coding I forgot to clean up the bullets when they had hit the bottom of the screen – it looked like a big pile of crap after a while. In addition, my horrible green UFOs had been turned sideways due to…erm…inexperience with x86 memory addressing, and almost looked like green bottoms instead. So the project turned into Shit Invaders. Oh yes, and as you can see I was childishly impressed by David Eddings when I tried to think of a handle to use.

I also experimented with Mode X scrolling. (Don’t ask what it is.) Childish humour resulted in the following scrolly effect:

The scroller starts small with the text “PEOPLE HAVE BEEN COMPLAINING ABOUT THE SIZE OF THE FONT IN MY SCROLLIES, SO…” and ends with a massively enlarged “BETTER?!”

I also worked on a platform game that I intended to call Satan Claus:

It may not look much, but there are actually three parallax layers: one background that simply were the gradient blue tones for the sky, one layer with the blue hills, and one layer with the foreground. I’m sure that it might even have looked pretty nice if I’d had a real artist to help me instead of making some crappy graphics myself.

Back to the timeline:

• Spring 1997: By now we were finishing high school and had to present what we had accomplished during our studies of the illustrious assembly language. This was one of the things I ended up showing to the teacher:

A simple demo effect with a generated flag (and its accompanying gradient colour table) and a bitmap manipulated by a sinus table in various ways. Simple enough, but it looked really nice. Go me! I did something that wasn’t just silly!

Of course, I compensated that brief bout of seriousness with making an action game inspired by Smash TV and Robotron, called Mega Brain Splashing:

A curious tidbit: this game sucked incredibly hard, and one of the reasons is that I had never actually played neither Robotron nor Smash TV – I had just read about them in video games magazines and imagined what the gameplay must be like. Curious tidbit number two: the title screen for Shit Invaders also featured a fire effect, but the difference was that by the time I made Mega Brain Splashing I had learned how to make it fast enough in real-time instead of just using a static picture.

More timeline business:

• Autumn 1997: I joined the Swedish military for 10 months of mandatory torture. Interestingly enough this led to a burst of creativity since I was located at the same place as one of the guys I’d been doing assembly programming with! Ka-ching! Touchdown! Together we experimented with many different subjects: 3D graphics, C programming, low-level optimizations of Bresenham algorithms, and so on. By myself, I continued making strange small games and proof of concepts:

I toyed with having enemies move in pre-determined paths, in something that would have been Mega Brain Splashing 2. This time there would have been a two-player mode.

I also started Mega Brain Splashing: The Medieval Interlude. This was going to be a gory action-RPG that combined exploration with lots of blood…and – as can be seen above – stolen graphics from the Exile II game. But most disturbing was probably this little game:

A Star Wars game completely written in assembly! I’ll spare you the text from the scroller, but I’ll note that involved mentions of homo saunas, epic dangers, and another trench run. Oh, and see how quirky it is – “Press Escape to play.” I must have thought that I was very clever and funny indeed. The game itself is quite simple: you pilot an X-Wing that has two shields – one to the left and one to the right. Hitting obstacles removes shield strength. If you shoot targets on the way you get points. And if you reach the end of a “level” you must fire off your proton torpedo at a specific goal. That’s it.

Eventually I was let out of the military and ended up studying computer science; that’s when I went over to the dark side – i.e. Windows programming. Many small games and projects emerged from that transition, one of which was in fact Mega Brain Splashing 3:

Ironically, many people found MBS 3 better than MBS 4 that I created later. There are no technical reasons for it: MBS 3 was in 8 bit colour, I used colour lookup tables to simulate transparencies, it just consisted of a single static map, it had a more basic gameplay, it had no bosses, the weapons weren’t very balanced, it wasn’t compatible with all graphic cards (due to the weird software rendering I used)… All of these things were improved on in MBS 4, but I just might have forgotten to transfer the most crucial part: the fun factor.

It’s often said that ideas are worth nothing, and only the implementation matters. However, this might really be just part of a bidirectional fact: ideas without implementation are useless, but implementations without a good idea results in a loss of this elusive fun factor. Maybe, in creating MBS 4, I concentrated too much on the technical aspects of the game instead of stopping to think: “Is this really fun? Am I basing the game on a good idea? Am I injecting my usual experimental mood and quirkiness into the game? Or am I just trying to improve the technical bits?”

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 22nd, 2007 at 4:33 am and is filed under Indie Games, Software Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.