
A developer who spent 13 years making his childhood game - radmuzom
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/219475/Meet_the_developer_who_spent_13_years_making_his_childhood_game.php
======
ChuckMcM
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 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 :-).

While I never finished my efforts (-1 for me I guess) I learned so much along
the way, I bought Dunnigan's excellent 'How to Make War' book which was the
bible for wargames at the time (and to some extent still is) and tackled path
finding algorithms, and automated forces deployment, and strategic evaluation
with limited vision, and all sorts of really interesting problems/puzzles that
each offered up a ton of interesting insight. Bottom line it wasn't a waste of
time for me, even though I have nothing to show for it.

I love that Adam stuck with it and got it done. Very inspiring.

~~~
jacquesm
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 on an ST so definitely not a slow machine and yet there were quite a
few tricks required to keep it all moving smoothly with close to 100 objects
on and off screen.

Good times :)

~~~
pkaye
What is the name of this game?

~~~
ChuckMcM
Well my wrist reflexively ached when he described it and a picture of
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier_Air_Wing_%28video_game%...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier_Air_Wing_%28video_game%29)
inserted itself into my head :-)

~~~
jacquesm
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-...](http://www.generation-msx.nl/software/aackosoft/flight-deck-
ii/3159/)

~~~
notastartup
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.

~~~
usr
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/](http://www.bizzley.com/)

HN discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6470106](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6470106)

------
Kronopath
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2b0tSu0QDQ0)

~~~
azinman2
Game looks pretty cool actually from the video!

~~~
Kronopath
You can try it yourself, it's free:
[http://www.tobiasgame.co.uk/](http://www.tobiasgame.co.uk/)

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fredleblanc
With all of this dedication to a project, I had to download it and try it.
Early on there's a room where everything is pitch black and it wants you to go
back and find something "luminous." So you're thinking, probably a flashlight
or torch or something.

Nope. It's a paintbrush with luminous paint. And it doesn't just light up the
room, you have to fling gobs of luminous paint all around to reveal platforms
in an otherwise dark room. And it's not just a ball at a time, each gob also
trails lesser speckles that also help out.

I know this isn't ground-breaking or anything, but it's certainly a refreshing
surprise from what you expect from games these days. It's something you wonder
about, where the answer is clearly, "well, why not?"

I went from interested to impressed in a matter of minutes. I thought I was
just going to download it to see what it was like, but now I'm curious what
other great ideas will come out of no where.

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munificent
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).

~~~
AndyNemmity
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.

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

~~~
nobodysfool
look at hattrick.org it's been running for years now.

~~~
AndyNemmity
hattrick is nice

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z3phyr
Off Topic: Some people say that Game Development is Saturated, but I believe
that there is still a lot to accomplish and still tons of ground braking
innovations in every sphere of Game Development are waiting for many more
generations of prodigy. Some people say that the Graphics are solved but I
believe, we still have miles to go for true realism. Please carry on with the
innovations in game dev :)

~~~
radmuzom
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.

~~~
warfangle
If you think ME is the epitome of storytelling in digital gaming, I highly
suggest you grab Planescape:Torment from Good Old Games[0]. And grab a few
mods to modernize the experience[1].

0\.
[http://www.gog.com/game/planescape_torment](http://www.gog.com/game/planescape_torment)

1\.
[http://www.gog.com/news/mod_spotlight_planescape_torment_mod...](http://www.gog.com/news/mod_spotlight_planescape_torment_mods_guide)

~~~
orillian
So true! I still have the game box sitting on the shelf for this! It's been
ages since I played it through, but it is still the game I look back at the
most fondly!

Never realized there was a push to mod the game so extensively. Gonna have to
give these mods a try and replay this one!

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AndyNemmity
I knew I wasn't going to play it, but I found a let's play so I could see the
details.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvMEu3Wl4OE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvMEu3Wl4OE)

If you're interested.

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thisjepisje
This game changes your screen resolution, if you don't want this you have to
select 'windowed' in settings.exe.

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barbs
That's awesome! Reminds me of Cave Story[1], a platforming-shooter created by
1 man over 5 years, also originally released for free.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_Story](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_Story)

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tbirdz
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 still devote enough time to polish
the outcome, while still having the time to explore many completely different
projects.

~~~
ricardolopes
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.

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throw7
Dang. Props to the guy for seeing this through to the end.

I know I've had this same type of vision, except it was when I was making wads
for doom. I had this wild idea of making this "super awesome" multi-level
castle. I soon was bogged down with slowness and trying to do things the
engine just couldn't handle causing artifacting et. al. Anyway, unlike this
guy, I just gave up. :D

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meanJim
I'm really happy this developer stuck through and made this game. It's really
inspiring and it shows that not all projects have to be motivated by external
motives. Sometimes you just want to make something because it matters to you.

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Vektorweg
I also try to write a game since roughly a decade. But i'm really lazy, so i
spend much more time in figuring out how to write a sufficiently good game in
as few time as possible than to write that game.

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VeejayRampay
That's great. It's kind of (personal interpretation here) Rick Dangerous meet
Wonderboy. Congratulations to the author for believing in his own dream,
that's real dedication.

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georgedrummond
I guess he didn't read "Lean Startup"

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xhamster
He should learn to code and remake it for Android or iOS?

Are there any good such games for mobile platforms? Maybe the game is not good
enough though...

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zackmorris
I, for one, applaud his effort :-)

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guyy321
This is awesome.

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runn1ng
Well, it still didn't took as long as Duke Nukem Forever.

But nearly.

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notastartup
This is some crazy persistence and dedication to a project.

And to think my 5 years was long, 5 years I will never get back working on my
web scraping project: [http://scrape.ly](http://scrape.ly)

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ansimionescu
Windows-only _sigh_

How difficult would it be to port this?

edit: it's not a snarky, rhetorical, question – I really want to play this

~~~
Torn
So you'd have to port the Multimedia Fusion 1.5 (MMF) engine he used to make
the game in.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Fusion](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Fusion)

That thing is going to be closed source, ancient, and not actively maintained.
1.5 seems to have been released in 2001.

Why don't you download a free MS VM from [https://www.modern.ie/en-
gb/virtualization-tools#downloads](https://www.modern.ie/en-gb/virtualization-
tools#downloads) and then try it on there using something like VMWare or
VirtualBox

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Were later versions of MMF somehow not backwards-compatible?

~~~
Torn
No idea; a quick Google tells me there were some compatibility issues

[http://community.clickteam.com/threads/34059-MMF-1-5-to-
MMF2...](http://community.clickteam.com/threads/34059-MMF-1-5-to-
MMF2-Compatibility-Bug)

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Heh.

I work on Gang Garrison 2, a game still actively developed which is also
reliant on a dead game creation tool (Game Maker 8.0), so this is sadly
familiar.

~~~
enthdegree
Do you know what happened to the project to redo GG2 in Python?

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
It got abandoned after a bit. Nobody is willing to do the work needed to
"finish" it.

~~~
Torn
Considered a ground-up rewrite using something like Unity? They have some
kickass 2D tooling now, plus you get physics for free

~~~
lmm
Unity is closed-source; I'll bet in ten years we'll see the same thing
happening again, with people trying desperately to find some way to run these
old games that were developed on the no-longer-supported Unity platform.

~~~
Torn
Dunno, I'd say Unity has enough traction behind it to not suddenly disappear.
It's a major contender now.

Developers write their own code in unity (C# or JS) as well as bringing in
their own assets (music, art, etc). So even if the unity engine disappears,
authors will be able to release their work in a meaningful fashion.

