Thursday, July 5, 2012

My Love of Games

I love games, board games, sports, and, most of all, video games. It’s the idea of making games that first drew my interest in computing. Way back in middle school, my dad let me put the old Adam computer in my bed room. I’m not sure why I wanted it, but I did. Unfortunately, we had no games for it, so it seemed it was only useful as a word processor, which is very boring for a kid. However, my dad had this book that contained games for the Adam. Wait. A book with computer games? How was such a thing possible? My dad loaded up the BASIC cassette and showed me how to copy the text from the book into BASIC. I was intrigued. I don’t think I ever bothered copying one of those games, but I did experiment with my own programs. I never made anything of note on the Adam before I ruined the BASIC cassette by accidentally putting it into the broken drive. I was upset until I learned that our DOS machine in the basement could do the same thing. I spent hours and hours toiling away at a simple text adventure game that you can still find on my web site. I have never lost my desire to make games. I still do want to make a real game, one that people really enjoy. The closest I came was with my final senior design project in college. My group designed and created a game based on the Mega Man series. Our group page is still available on my old college’s server. Years have passed since then without my even working on a game. I have ideas in my head, for sure, but I don’t have anything concrete enough to actually start making a game. A week ago, a friend of mine from college (one of the people in my senior design group) contacted me. After some talking, we’ve decided to try to make a game together in Flash. We’re taking things slow but I think we’ll actually be able to make a full game if we can stick with it. Slow and steady wins the race.

Unfortunately, this reminds me all too well of why I left the Clickteam community all those years ago. I’ve just moved on and so has the community. We’re simply not a good fit anymore. Oh well, all good things must come to an end.