My family had a computer for as long as I can remember, because I
don't ever remember getting our first computer — it was always there.
This has always puzzled me a little bit because my father is someone who
when first told to move the cursor on the screen using the mouse,
physically picked up the mouse and moved it across the screen. He's
gotten a bit better since then, and can turn the computer on and search
for country music on YouTube, but he's a bit of a technophobe. One of
those baby boomers who refuses to accept that yes, they too can
use a computer. I'm sure that if he abandoned that mindset, he would do
just fine. But I never quite understood why he dished out a few grand
for a computer, being as frugal as he can be. Maybe he's smarter than I
think.
Mixed in with my early memories of running
around barefoot outside to the point where I could sprint on gravel as
if it were grass, coming home covered in mud head to toe because I was
crawling through freshly dug ditches, catching frogs, snakes, and
crayfish, sledding down hills and dodging tombstones, riding on
four-wheelers, outrunning everyone else in my class, and shooting plenty
of guns, I have my memories of that computer.
I think that one of the first memories, and one of the fondest was playing
Scorched Earth (1991) with my father and brothers.
Scorched Earth was a turn based game where you and x
number of other players were in control of tank located statically on a
randomly generated mountain. You got to choose your tank model which
consisted of a few variances of shapes from a half circle to a
rectangle, and you had a budget which you spent on your arsenal. Do you
go for one great big nuke, a handful of smaller bombs, maybe something
more creative like an earth bomb which coats an area in a fresh layer of
dirt, a rolly-type bomb which will roll down a hill until it hits
something, maybe a shield to keep you alive for longer? I've gotta say
that the game was pretty damn neat, and remains that way in my head to
this day.
The game was two
dimensional, and you looked at the randomly generated mountain from the
side. If I recall correctly, your tanks were randomly placed. You took
your turns round-robin style and tried to get your trajectory just right
so that you could blow the other guy's tank to hell. Maybe you shoot
sky high so that it falls straight down into a ravine onto your enemy,
or maybe it's a pretty clear shot straight across. Whatever you ended up
hitting, it would blow the shit out of the terrain and the dirt would
shift, along with anyone on that dirt. I haven't played it since those
few times when I was little, but I can still vividly remember the 8-bit
sound effects. Nostalgia is a slightly euphoric thing.
Another game on the list of firsts was
Lemmings (1991).
Another
two dimensional, side profile game. It goes like this: You progress
through levels which get progressively harder. There's a portal (or
two?) in each level, and out of this portal comes an army of little guys
who are constantly marching forward. They don't give a damn what
they're marching into which means that they'll walk themselves right off
a cliff, which is extremely entertaining, but not a good way to get to
the next level.
Each level of Lemmings has an exit
portal, usually located across very hazardous terrain. It's your job to
get those little guys to the exit portal, and in order to do that, you
have to help the ceaselessly marching Lemmings.
The tool that you use to keep those little guys alive and get them to the exit portal is basically that you hand out jobs to the lemmings. You get x
number of various jobs to hand out on each level, and you pick and
choose which lemmings to give those jobs to. One job might be "Stand
still and don't let any of the other little fuckers by."; you give it to
the guy at the front of the line, he stops, holds his hands out, and
any lemming that runs into him gets turned around in the other
direction. Combine this with "Here's an umbrella that you can use to
fall safely from great heights." "Here's a shovel, get digging." "Here's
a high explosive vest, make a hole over there.", etcetera, and you end
up with enough tools to solve the puzzles (hazardous terrain between the
entrance and exit portals). Hopefully with minimal lemming casualties.
It's
not a game that I can say I ever got very far in as a kid, but it was
one of my first and very memorable. When I was a teenager trying to come
up with a universal username to use on the internet and I wasn't
satisfied with what I had previously chosen ('Smurf' — I've never
actually seen any of the cartoons and the name still sounds sort of
stupid to me to this day), I opted for 'Lemmings'. It had some
significance, and it sounded good enough. Something that I could
probably adopt as my online name for the rest of my life. But, the
internet is a big place with a lot of people and so it needed a more
unique identifier. Appending a number made the most sense to me, so I
went with '
Lemmings19' where the '19' has some super secret significance.
Wolfenstein is very violent and you
run around what is almost a maze of room, gunning down Nazis and their
German Shepherds, ultimately fighting Mecha-Hitler.
Doom
is ultra-violent and you run around gunning down mean bastards
brandishing all manner of guns, along with a plethora of monsters in a
very dark universe (I recommend playing a mod for it called Brutal Doom which brings it into the twenty-first century but leaves the core of the game intact).
Toning
it down, Day of the Tentacle and Monkey Island are humour based
point-and-click adventures set in colourful universes. One has you
trying to save the world from mad tentacles who want to take over, the
other has you setting out to prove that your really are a mean pirate
and not just some limp wristed kid (the latter is true).
Finally Commander Keen is a side-scrolling platformer where you do platformer stuff.
Of
that list, they all had their impact on me (except Commander Keen to a
large extent — it was kinda humdrum). Doom (and some Wolfenstein) showed
me the visceral and awesome world of shooting the shit out of stuff
while proving to me that censorship is fucking terrible and moronic. Day
of the Tentacle and Monkey Island (along with many successors) showed
me the joys of humour in video games, what fun it is to solve puzzles in
a point-and-click world (when done well), and how beautiful pixel art
can be.
Fallout 2 was an isometric, turn based, role playing game. It
was one of those titles that demonstrated how good it is not to censor.
It was full of dark humour, violence, and very mature subjects. As with
Doom, I was a little kid when I played it. One thing about kids is that
they don't really take offense. What they do do is learn, and
absorb. If they're smart and maybe with some guidance, they learn right
from wrong and can distinguish the two apart. I think it's a mistake to
censor everything from children, because without the opportunity to be
given exposure to both good and bad, you're missing out on a lot of
potential learning experiences at a point in your life when it really
counts. A lot of people, myself included, owe much of their wisdom and
knowledge to being exposed to 'bad' things when they're kids. It's a
part of life, and one that our society should not attempt to censor as
we do. Deal with, most certainly, but not censor. We want to teach kids
to deal with things rather than ignore them.
Half-Life
blew my freaking mind the first time I played it. My parents had just
purchased a new computer from the local cunt of a computer store owner
who sells the ignorant locals shit hardware at grossly inflated prices
with terrible support. That aside, it was at least an order of magnitude
faster than the first generation Pentium that we had, and where Duke
Nukem 3D was the most impressive game I had seen before, Half-Life was a
full generation ahead and truly was three-dimensional. My mouth
dropped at the visuals, but it was the game itself that kept me playing
(something that shouldn't be forgotten about what actually makes a
video game good). It was then that my life had made a dramatic shift
away from running around outside over to spending all of my spare time
in front of the computer. Something that would come to affect me
dramatically as the years went on.
Quickly following up Half-Life — as we were at least a year or two late to that party — was a
dialup
internet connection and Counter-Strike. If you weren't ever a PC gamer
before 2005, you might not be familiar with just how much things have
changed since then. Up until around 2005, it was expected that you'd
have as much freedom of access to your computer games as you did your
computer itself. "I can change the hardware on my computer, I can change
the software too." was along the mindset. It was usually a given, not
an argument. As such, it was a golden age for modding. Taking the game
that you're given, getting into the developer tools for it, modifying it to your interests, and sharing the results. This sparked
many great games, and some of them are to this day the most popular
games in existence. League of Legends or DoTA 2? The
direct result of a mod, DoTA. In fact, Counter-Strike is doing
extremely well to this day in the form of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, not to mention it's original incarnation that is
still hugely popular and active.
Counter-Strike
was a mod for Half-Life, and it took it online. It was a multiplayer
game where you paired into two teams with other players, and played x
number of rounds to decide which team won, sort of like scoring goals
until you hit the limit. It was made by some guys in their spare time
and took off like wildfire. Incredibly popular, incredibly successful,
completely free (if you owned Half-Life). A huge part of what made
Counter-Strike successful was how many mods and maps other people
added to it. It was a community game, for the people, by the people.
Counter-Strike introduced me to playing with other people on the
computer, and it's probably responsible for teaching me how to type.
"FUCK YOU FUCKING AWP CAMPER WHORE SLUT NOOB" in about 0.5 seconds flat —
turns out that being pissed off is a really good incentive for learning
how to type quickly.
Battlefield 1942 was another
multiplayer shooter, similar to Counter-Strike, but this time in a very
large open world environment with tanks and planes. My love of this game
has spanned across a large number of expansions and new versions, right
up to the modern day. I've put
hundreds and
hundreds and
hundreds and
hundreds of hours into this franchise, and those are just the recorded hours.
Prior
to year 2000, games I played were heavily (if not entirely)
influenced by my older brother, Ben. He's about three years older than I
am, and he has always been a very big gamer. He had an active
subscription to PC Gamer magazine, back before you could just browse
your phone while you sat on the toilet. It was the games that he was
interested in and he purchased that ended up being the games I played
and the games I was interested in. I didn't have any money to buy games
of my own by that time, and I never really thought about it. I was
plenty entertained by what he brought in.
When I was
still a kid, there was the odd trip to a friend's place, and they might
have a console. The N64 had some extremely memorable titles such as
Ocarina of Time, Mario Party, or Goldeneye. I eventually did get a
Playstation 2 a few years after it came out, but I was never taken in by
consoles the same way that I was on PC. PC had so much more depth than
just popping in a CD and playing a game. PC's had keyboards, reliable
online play, internet browsers, configurable hardware, full access to
the software, and so much more!
When the ripoff
computer that my parents bought inevitably went tits-up due to the low
quality components, Ben bought a new computer. It changed the dynamic
where we used to take turns on the 'family' computer over to me trying
to get a chance to play on his computer. He was gracious enough
to put up with it for those years and once I had scrounged enough money,
I put a computer of my own together.
As the years
rolled on, I kept playing new games. Those early years (1990-2005) were
the brightest in game development. Developers tried so many new things,
and broke so much new ground in the process. New genres were created.
Heaps of new technology was introduced and used. Video games evolved,
adapted, failed to adapt, went down dead ends, made mistakes, learned
from those mistakes, and then made new mistakes. The more they evolved,
the more room for error there was. It was a high jump competition where
the bar was constantly being raised higher and higher. For those with
the budget, it was simply a matter of clearing that higher bar. For
those without the budget, it was a matter of circumventing the bar
altogether, but that was proving very difficult around the mid 2000's.
The high budget stuff is fun, but it's the innovation that is inspiring.
The
level of complexity grew (and continues to grow) so large that it's
hard to focus on what exactly makes a great game these days. I don't
think that it was until the mid to late 2000's when we really started to focus on ease of use. Games were supposed
to be hard and you never considered that they should have been made it
easier. They were also allowed to be very slow paced and didn't have to
be full of distractions in order to keep people's attention. We're
certainly a generation which has been made to require constant
distractions by this point in time, and likewise everyone who uses
software has been made to expect perfection by now (I myself sure
wouldn't settle for anything less). I mention this because this method
of thinking will have a very visible influence on any posts to follow in
this topic of software development.
From 1999 up until
2009, or just before I turned twenty, computers
held an untouchable status in my life. What'd I spend my money on?
Computer parts, games. What'd I spend my spare time on? Computer games.
Where'd I work? Computer shop. It's safe to say that they
comprised a lot of my life, and up until then they really could
give me the feeling a kid gets right before Christmas. Every new
computer part had this fantastic sense of anticipation and ultimate
satisfaction that seems to be harder to find as you experience more and
more in life. Not that I don't still enjoy scouring new computer parts
to build a new machine, just maybe not quite in the same way. Games were
awesome and
there wasn't any need to think much past that.
The
first day of 2009 was when I found love for the first time. That love
was short lived and quickly turned into having my soul crushed for the
first time. Suddenly, other things began to take priority. I suppose
that I was being introduced to real life for the first time; there's
stuff outside of computer games, apparently. I had spent a little over a
decade letting my physical health degrade, and along with it much of my
mental health went too. Computers would still remain a very large part
of my life, but to a lesser extent. In a lot of ways, it was that love
and heartbreak that motivated me to get my ass moving and start fixing a
lot of the problems I was beginning to identify in myself as I was
maturing.
Without much of any thought, I enrolled into a
computer programming course at a nearby college. It made enough sense
to me: There's no shortage of work in it and I'm a nerd. Bingo bango,
I'm on a new path. I considered going to Toronto or somewhere like that
to take a game development course, but it just didn't seem practical to
me, as interesting as game development was, I didn't believe that
it would be reliable.
From the early to late 2000's,
game development was becoming more and more of a big business venture.
The paradigm of video games had gotten so big and so complex, where
technology and graphics were king. Little guys couldn't get very far
among those giants until right at the very end of the 2000s', right
before the 10's — the 'ought tens' I guess — a shift had begun.
Independent (or 'indie' in Hipster lingo) developers were starting to
pick up. People started to discover that "Oh, three dimensions and
amazing production value isn't actually the soul of a video game.".
People started developing good, very solid games that used
old principles mixed with modern innovation, and other people started buying them. It was a new age
for 'indie' development. But making video games was still a big risk
financially: If a game didn't do well; too bad, potentially no money for you
and you're out of a job.
Fast forward a few years
later, I've graduated, worked as a developer for a few years, moved to
the other side of Canada, gotten my ass into shape, dealt with a lot of
the mental problems that haunted me, and largely grew out of my old
shell. This brings us a lot closer to present day.
By
now, everyone saw how easy it was becoming to successfully sell a low
budget game and jumped on the bandwagon. Now the market is
over-saturated as shit with these games. A lot of that saturation is shit games.
It's not from the people who saw the opportunity to make this awesome
game they had an idea for (though sometimes that turns out to be shit
too), it's cunts like the computer salesman from earlier who see an
opportunity to exploit. Fucking cunts. Produce shit, spam it out there,
take people's money, ruin the industry, they don't give a flying fuck.
Now it's not all their fault, I'm pretty sure the market would be
saturated either way, but they sure don't help. Good news is that I only
want to make a game (a good game) for the love of it, and not for money; otherwise it would be hopeless.
With
my new life away from home, I decided that I wanted to go ahead and use
some of my time to develop a video game. I went through a lot of
planning and design to figure out what exactly I wanted to make that
would suit my interests and be feasible at the same time. I decided on a
tool for it, one that was supposed to be easy to use to make the sort
of game that I was going to make, and I got started. Turns out that it
takes a lot of effort, and I quickly found myself uninterested in
developing it much of the time. I already had a full time job developing
software and sitting behind a computer, and then I had other things
that I now had to go out and do like run, hike, ski, go to the gym, and
do a bit of socializing. Nope, when I got home, I just wanted to relax
and get away from a lot of that stuff, so I'd spin up a game and play
some. I always felt guilty doing this, but, well... I don't know what to
say.
It wasn't long before my new environment and all
of the wonders it had started to get routine. So I skipped town and
backpacked around the world for a year. Hitchhiking, staying in hostels,
couchsurfing, staying with people I had just met, and exploring.
Letting things flesh out naturally and going with the flow.
For
the first little while of those travels, I spent quite a bit of time
working on the game that I had started about a year prior. I got a lot
of work done. I did a crapload of the design, figured out how a lot of
things would work, what I wanted in the game, what I didn't want in the
game, and I implemented a lot of it. I had the base level of a working
game done! But the tool I was using was clearly not made to support an
actual application written with actual code. It was shit, and I decided
to scrap it and start over using a tool that actually made sense.
Hindsight is 20/20 and I'd never consider using that original tool again
for obvious reasons. This was also at the same time that I left North
America and hit Asia. Between really starting my adventure and having to start from scratch, I haven't touched that project since.
This
day, today, right now as I write this, I find myself back in Canada. I
chose a new city, even further from home, and I'm just getting settled
in here. Turns out that December is a poor time of year to look for work
due to the fiscal year ending, everyone gearing up for the holidays,
and either taking those days off or churning out as much as they can
before the year ends. So, I find myself with a lot of free time. Today
is December the nineteenth, and so most everyone is going to be on
vacation for the next two weeks. No sense in job hunting during that
time, not much I'll be doing... Seems like a pretty prime opportunity to
revisit the idea of making a game.
Oh and uhh, start a blog, apparently.
