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A developer who spent 13 years making his childhood game

gamasutra.com

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Re: A developer who spent 13 years making his childhood game

#51

Post by ido »

AndyNemmity wrote: post #37
munificent wrote: post #2

I've been working on a roguelike for, I think, about 14 years now. It's gone through several rewrites, different languages, different UIs, and it's never come close to being done. These days, I tend to think of it more as a garden: something for me to putter around in but not as much a product (though I would love to get it to a point where other people can play it).

I have a similar game. I have a text based online football game, and can relate a great deal to many things he said, like the albatross. I will start trying to reframe it in my mind as a garden. That sounds much nicer :) I think 500 people right now play my game, and if anything that makes the weight of it all larger.

I'm guessing something more like Football Manager than a game where you're moving the actual players in real time.

Re: A developer who spent 13 years making his childhood game

#52

Post by Kronopath »

azinman2 wrote: post #40
Kronopath wrote: post #10

This article is pretty light on content. Much more interesting is the well-produced video the dev made himself, talking about his experience making the game, and talking about why it took 13 years. The Game That Time Forgot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2b0tSu0QDQ0

Game looks pretty cool actually from the video!

You can try it yourself, it's free: http://www.tobiasgame.co.uk/

Re: A developer who spent 13 years making his childhood game

#53

Post by AndyNemmity »

ido wrote: post #51
AndyNemmity wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a similar game. I have a text based online football game, and can relate a great deal to many things he said, like the albatross. I will start trying to reframe it in my mind as a garden. That sounds much nicer :) I think 500 people right now play my game, and if anything that makes the weight of it all larger.

I'm guessing something more like Football Manager than a game where you're moving the actual players in real time.

You are correct. There is no visualization for what happens, but there are summaries (box score) and play by play data.. long text file with lots of details for hardcore fans.

Re: A developer who spent 13 years making his childhood game

#54

Post by AndyNemmity »

Hortinstein wrote: post #47
AndyNemmity wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a similar game. I have a text based online football game, and can relate a great deal to many things he said, like the albatross. I will start trying to reframe it in my mind as a garden. That sounds much nicer :) I think 500 people right now play my game, and if anything that makes the weight of it all larger.

so...i am not a huge football fan, but this sounds interesting. Can you link it?

If you're not a huge football fan, it will be an over complicated mess to you, in all honesty.

It's a hardcore game. I've been trying to make it easier, but given the difficulties in the engine (vb6 and classic asp), it's been difficult to create a structure that makes sense. Plus as a hardcore fan, I have a lot of blindness on how to make it easier.

I really relate to everything he said in his documentary. Do you rewrite tons of work? Do you re platform? Tons of issues.

It was started in 2004, so that's a lot of old crud and bad coding.

The community helps some times with javascript plugins, and sometimes full windows utilities to make all the data easier to take in, but it's still a mess.

I need to figure out ultimately what I want to do with it, but it's a fun game, a good premise, there are other competitors with similar challenges. I don't know... :)

Re: A developer who spent 13 years making his childhood game

#55

Post by ChuckMcM »

ido wrote: post #48
ChuckMcM wrote: post #20

That pretty much defines 'art' I think. The artist is compelled to see the vision through, it isn't about the money or the time or the cost. I am quite impressed he stuck it through. A long time ago (1983 to be precise) I started rewriting Empire, a curses based turn based strategy game (Hi Walter!) because I was convinced I could make it so much better and I had spent a lot of hours playing it. When I was at Intel w…

When I was at Intel working on a high end graphics chip I joked with one of the design engineers that it would be cool if you could see little armies fighting but we both agreed there probably wouldn't be enough CPU / graphics capability to do that in real time, at least not in our lifetime :-) You really didn't think that would be possible in your lifetime in 1983? I'd think that would have seen pretty feasible by t…

I realize that this is an off the cuff sort of comment but two things stand out, first you have give credit to the Amiga as it was stunningly better than anything else when it was released in 1984, and as wonderful as it was, Populous (perhaps the first game will small isometric animated battles) didn't come out until 1989. In 1983 running Microsoft flight simulator on the CGA card was state of the art :-).

Since I was at Intel at the time neither one of us expected computers to get 1,000x better than they were at that moment in time (the 80286 @ 10Mhz woo hoo!) I was driving a BARCO 1024 x 768 RGB monitor that cost Intel $3,000 to purchase, they were predicting it would be under $1,000 in the next 10 years or so. Its hard to have little animated pieces running around recognizably on a pixel budget of 15 x 15 and perhaps 8 bits per to select out of a color pallet of 4096.

So the photo realistic stuff we saw at Siggraph we didn't expect would be 'real time' in our lifetimes, certainly not at anything close to affordable a price. And yes, we were way off base, but that is the nature of things.

Re: A developer who spent 13 years making his childhood game

#56

Post by pkaye »

jacquesm wrote: post #34
ChuckMcM wrote: post #20

That pretty much defines 'art' I think. The artist is compelled to see the vision through, it isn't about the money or the time or the cost. I am quite impressed he stuck it through. A long time ago (1983 to be precise) I started rewriting Empire, a curses based turn based strategy game (Hi Walter!) because I was convinced I could make it so much better and I had spent a lot of hours playing it. When I was at Intel w…

Similar story, I got hired by a game development company to make a strategy game involving an aircraft carrier, a ton of aircraft and all kinds of boats and characters. When it was done it was a mini multi-tasking operating system, it taught me more than any project that I'd done up to that point. And the fact that it all played out in real time on a screen made it very easy to see if it wasn't keeping up. This was o…

What is the name of this game?

Re: A developer who spent 13 years making his childhood game

#57

Post by munificent »

CmonDev wrote: post #3
munificent wrote: post #2

I've been working on a roguelike for, I think, about 14 years now. It's gone through several rewrites, different languages, different UIs, and it's never come close to being done. These days, I tend to think of it more as a garden: something for me to putter around in but not as much a product (though I would love to get it to a point where other people can play it).

I wonder if all developers could be roughly split into two groups: those who have lots of small initial projects and those who have mostly one big project (also unfinished but with more progress).

I have a giant pile of smaller projects too. :(

Re: A developer who spent 13 years making his childhood game

#58

Post by SixSigma »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #20

That pretty much defines 'art' I think. The artist is compelled to see the vision through, it isn't about the money or the time or the cost. I am quite impressed he stuck it through. A long time ago (1983 to be precise) I started rewriting Empire, a curses based turn based strategy game (Hi Walter!) because I was convinced I could make it so much better and I had spent a lot of hours playing it. When I was at Intel w…

Are you sure about the book title? That one is a guide to post ww2 combat whereas this one:

The Complete Wargames Handbook

http://www.hyw.com/Books/WargamesHandbook/Contents.htm

Is about how to make computer war games.

Re: A developer who spent 13 years making his childhood game

#60

Post by ChuckMcM »

pkaye wrote: post #56
jacquesm wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar story, I got hired by a game development company to make a strategy game involving an aircraft carrier, a ton of aircraft and all kinds of boats and characters. When it was done it was a mini multi-tasking operating system, it taught me more than any project that I'd done up to that point. And the fact that it all played out in real time on a screen made it very easy to see if it wasn't keeping up. This was o…

What is the name of this game?

Well my wrist reflexively ached when he described it and a picture of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier_Air_Wing_%28video_game%... inserted itself into my head :-)
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