I learned the basics of computer programming by trying to program text-based games on ancient Commodore hardware, which wasn’t ancient at the time.
All this code has of course been lost to the sands of time.
Category Archives: Games
Log 10: Random Dungeon Encounters
Here I demo initial progress with generating random dungeon encounters — the very first steps in building my dungeon crawler game.
More to come. 🙂
Log 9: I’ve Started Building a Game
I’ve started building a classic-style dungeon crawler game.
This is going to be fun. And hard.
Log 8: Unity Quiz-I-Cool Project
Here’s a demo video for my third Unity course project, a quiz game.
Even though it’s simple, I learned a lot from this.
The next video will be about the game project that I’ve started.
Log 7: Unity Learning Progress with Snow Boarder
Here I demo a small project that I assembled as part of my learning in the Unity 2D course from Gamedev.tv.
The saga continues…
Log 6: Resource Hoarding and Humble Bundle
Here I confess to resource hoarding.
Log 5: How I’m Learning Unity
A short video detailing how I’ve started my Unity learning journey.
The Udemy course that I’ve been using to learn Unity is available here.
Log 4: Why I’ve Decided To Start With Unity
If you’re looking for a game engine, there are a lot of options.
I’ve decided to go with Unity for my first game. Here’s why.
Log 2: Why do I NEED to build a game?
An explanation of how game development is basically a necessity for me. There’s more to it, which I’m sure I’ll talk about more. Subscribe for the rest of the story.
Log 1: A Declaration of Intent
I’m beginning an epic journey.
Stay tuned for more.
Coming Full Circle With Game Development (Unity)
The very first programming I ever did was game programming.
It started with my Commodore VIC-20 in 1984. The computer’s manual had some BASIC programs you could type in and run. One was a Space-Invaders-type game.
Well, naturally, after typing in this game and playing it for a bit, I wanted to start making changes to enemy colors, speed, and score values. This was how I started programming.
It continued when I got a Tandy 1000 EX that ran MS-DOS and started writing games in GW-BASIC. By now I was coding much more detailed and complex programs. They were still text-only (ASCII), but I was creating them from scratch, and they had much more detailed mechanics.
I remember well a text-based gladiator combat tournament game that I spent the better part of a year working on, at about age 10, in addition to a few text-based adventure games.
Later, as the Internet started to grow, I became interested in multi-user dungeons. There were various codebases — Diku, Merc, Envy, Circle, and others. Not only did I work on some existing games, I also created my own, starting with Illustrium Arcana, and later with the Basternae rewrite, Basternae 3: Phoenix Rising. If you look at the “Basternae and ModernMUD” topic on this blog, you’ll see that I was working on them well into 2013.
When I was finishing my college degree in 2004, I took some classes for credit at The Game Institute and got a job with a company working on simulators for the US Army (among other government contracts). It was basically a video game company, but replace “fun” with “realism”. I didn’t really work on any graphics code, and ended up specializing in audio and network communications. This was the first and last job I had in video games.
My strong knowledge of audio programming and networking protocols took me on to develop parts of the Authentic8 SILO browser, work on a home automation system, and build the various audio applications I released as Zeta Centauri.
Now I’m returning to my roots and learning Unity. It’s incredibly intuitive, and the programming is easy and natural thanks to the many years I spent writing C# code.
I’ve started with the “Complete C# Unity Game Developer 2D” course available through Udemy. I’m about 50% of the way through, and the deep, thorough coverage coupled with real hands-on coding projects has been great for the learning process. I’m definitely going to take more of the Gamedev.tv courses because they really know how to teach.
I’m Available for Hire for Music Composition on Fiverr
Do you have a movie or video game that you want original music for? I’m now available for hire on Fiverr for composition work.
Since I have decades of experience in composing, recording, and mixing original ambient and soundtrack-style, I can create something both unique and high-quality.
Sure, you could go with one of hundreds of Hans Zimmer clones, but if you want something different — something that doesn’t sound like it came from a stock music website — having me write something for you would be a very good choice.
Tarf: Dragonslayer
Tarf killed the dragon on Dragonwilds. I still haven’t come anywhere close — best I’ve been able to do is level 3 at 12th place.
New Monsters on Dragon Wilds
I recently expanded the monster pool on Dragon Wilds by a third. It’s still the same impossible old-style text-based combat game, but now with more things to get killed by.
Enjoy:
Multiverse MMO Engine
There’s a game engine designed for building massively multiplayer online games. It’s called Multiverse. It was originally a proprietary engine, but it went open source at the beginning of the year when the company that created it went out of business.
I played with it a bit back in 2010 before I left Ohio. When I moved to California in the second half of 2010 I ended up working in the same building as Multiverse, Inc. They were winding down the company when I arrived and I ended up buying one of their old computers, a monitor, and an office chair. I met the founder, Bill Turpin, who also happened to work with the database admin where I was working when they were both at Netscape.
A while later they open sourced the project. I didn’t have the spare attention cycles to dig into it for the first few months, but started tinkering with it again in April. It’s a lot of fun to play with, but needs a lot of work, especially in the ease-of-use area.
I joined the development team and have been contributing the occasional bugfix. To find out more visit this website:
www.multiversemmo.com
Holy Mother of Awesome: DAoC Emulator
I can’t believe I never heard of this before now, but apparently there’s a Dark Age of Camelot server emulation project:
Unsurprisingly, the most popular server is based on classic pre-Trials-of-Atlantis DAoC.
Not that Bast3 needs more things to distract me from it, but I’ve been tinkering with it a bit, and may eventually put up a custom server. Not soon.
