Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A developer who spent 13 years making his childhood game

gamasutra.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 106 posts

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

#81

Post by usr »

notastartup wrote: post #76
jacquesm wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty close. The game was called FlightDeck and the publisher was Aackosoft. It was a bit earlier though, 1980s, I'm a bit hazy on the exact date but it would have to be somewhere around 1988 or so. Here are some shots from the MSX version (which was made a few years earlier by an absolutely awesome programmer called Steve Course). http://www.generation-msx.nl/software/aackosoft/flight-deck-...

What an amazing feeling it must've been. I absolutely LOVE hearing these developer war stories from 80s and 90s, although 90s more because I am a 90s kid. It definitely makes me feel that today's average devs are spoiled with all the innovations that have taken place...and still can't roll out a hit.

If you haven't seen it already, you might enjoy reading "It's Behind You" by Bob Pape. It's about how the game R-Type was ported to the ZX Spectrum back in the day.

http://www.bizzley.com/

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6470106

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

#82

Post by SixSigma »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #55
ido wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Did you never see what a 1mhz 6502 could do?

KnightLore 1984 http://retrospec.sgn.net/users/ignacio/images/knightlr.gif

Did you never go to a video games arcade?

BattleZone came out in 1980

Seriously, the PC took years to become State of the Art when VESA local bus freed us from IBM dictating the game with E/ISA and ceeding control by trying to force MCA on the world.

Anyone who knew about Trocadero http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Trocadero knew what was coming

There was a Transputer network game doing realtime raytracing!

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

#84

Post by ricardolopes »

tbirdz wrote: post #78

I'm always impressed when I see people who have spent such a large amount of time on a single project. Me personally, I keep flitting from project to project, creating a prototype, or a proof-of-concept before I get interested in something else and pursue that. I think a lot of people fall into these categories, breadth first vs. depth first. It's probably best to seek a balance between the two, as then you will stil…

Yep, that's me, too. Always coming up with new ideas for great projects, moved by a great spark of curiosity, but usually those projects just tend to die because after some time I've learned most of what I wanted to (I start getting into the boring details, like polishing, bug fixing, etc) and also because new ideas and new stuff to learn just appear and take all my attention. Even though I know that for every new project the chances of completion are close to 0, I still start them every time because it's still fun to experiment and useful to learn. And, who knows, maybe one of them might spark my curiosity long enough to make it a more serious project that might actually get to somewhere.

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

#85

Post by jacquesm »

notastartup wrote: post #76
jacquesm wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty close. The game was called FlightDeck and the publisher was Aackosoft. It was a bit earlier though, 1980s, I'm a bit hazy on the exact date but it would have to be somewhere around 1988 or so. Here are some shots from the MSX version (which was made a few years earlier by an absolutely awesome programmer called Steve Course). http://www.generation-msx.nl/software/aackosoft/flight-deck-...

What an amazing feeling it must've been. I absolutely LOVE hearing these developer war stories from 80s and 90s, although 90s more because I am a 90s kid. It definitely makes me feel that today's average devs are spoiled with all the innovations that have taken place...and still can't roll out a hit.

If you want to read more about that particular gig:

http://jacquesmattheij.com/A+tale+of+two+programmers

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

#86

Post by jacquesm »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #55
ido wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

> Populous (perhaps the first game will small isometric animated battles) didn't come out until 1989.

I think Guantlet beat Populous by several years on that score.

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

#87

Post by wtetzner »

eric_cc wrote: post #65
radmuzom wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Graphics is important and I believe we will continue to see further innovations in this space. However, I believe that we still need to achieve a lot in "story-telling" in games. The Mass Effect series is probably one of the best out there - the setting, characters, interactions, morality and gameplay.

I feel exactly the opposite. To hell with graphics and story-telling - I want to play a GAME with good GAMEPLAY

What exactly does that mean?

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

#88

Post by bencollier49 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #77
tcgv wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Wasn't Moore's law[1] as widespread as it is nowadays back then? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law

Yes, and in fact Gordon was still Chairman of Intel, but the thing about exponentials is they are always S curves. The trick is knowing when they are going to taper off and go flat :-)

You mean a logistic function. It starts off looking exponential. Exponentials don't go flat.

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

#89

Post by bencollier49 »

jacquesm wrote: post #62
ChuckMcM wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :-)

Pretty close. The game was called FlightDeck and the publisher was Aackosoft. It was a bit earlier though, 1980s, I'm a bit hazy on the exact date but it would have to be somewhere around 1988 or so. Here are some shots from the MSX version (which was made a few years earlier by an absolutely awesome programmer called Steve Course). http://www.generation-msx.nl/software/aackosoft/flight-deck-...

That looks as though it might have been inspiration for "Carrier Command".

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

#90

Post by [deleted] »

jacquesm wrote: post #62
ChuckMcM wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :-)

Pretty close. The game was called FlightDeck and the publisher was Aackosoft. It was a bit earlier though, 1980s, I'm a bit hazy on the exact date but it would have to be somewhere around 1988 or so. Here are some shots from the MSX version (which was made a few years earlier by an absolutely awesome programmer called Steve Course). http://www.generation-msx.nl/software/aackosoft/flight-deck-...

[deleted]
Post reply on HN