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A developer who spent 13 years making his childhood game
- munificent 12y agoI'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).
- CmonDev 12y agoI wonder if all developers could be roughly split into two groups: those who have lots of small initial projects and those who have mostly one big project (also unfinished but with more progress).
- gohrt 12y agoand a middle group of folks with some big projects and some little ones.
- Torn 12y agoso, no then
- forrestthewoods 12y agoI'd put all people, including non-developers, into two groups. Those who finish their side projects and those who don't. The size of the first group is very, very small.
- Karunamon 12y agoYou must be careful about that distinction - some projects are never "finished". Especially in the case of code, where the traditional definition means less "complete" and more "unsupported and unmaintained", i.e. analogous to "dead".
- AndyNemmity 12y agoDoesn't that tie to his point about ambition? People with side projects with huge ambitious goals don't complete them, because the goals are so large. My side project is a fully realistic nfl simulation that mirrors the exact details of a real football game. The ambition is what never makes it "complete". I have a functional, effective football game. But is it a true accurate simulation? no. Is that even possible? Probably not.
- munificent 12y agoI have a giant pile of smaller projects too. :(
- mrec 12y agoI really like the garden analogy. It's something I usually feel obscurely guilty about just puttering, but I probably shouldn't. Personal projects are supposed to be a hobby, not an obligation.
- AndyNemmity 12y agoI 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 12y agoso...i am not a huge football fan, but this sounds interesting. Can you link it?
- AndyNemmity 12y agoIf you're not a huge football fan, it will be an over complicated mess to you, in all honesty. It's a hardcore game. I've been trying to make it easier, but given the difficulties in the engine (vb6 and classic asp), it's been difficult to create a structure that makes sense. Plus as a hardcore fan, I have a lot of blindness on how to make it easier. I really relate to everything he said in his documentary. Do you rewrite tons of work? Do you re platform? Tons of issues. It was started in 2004, so that's a lot of old crud and bad coding. The community helps some times with javascript plugins, and sometimes full windows utilities to make all the data easier to take in, but it's still a mess. I need to figure out ultimately what I want to do with it, but it's a fun game, a good premise, there are other competitors with similar challenges. I don't know... :)
- nobodysfool 12y agolook at hattrick.org it's been running for years now.
- AndyNemmity 12y agohattrick is nice
- pdenya 12y ago> a text based online football game What? Can you describe it differently? I have no concept of how this could be played.
- z3phyr 12y agoOff 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 :)
- thisjepisje 12y agoAnd don't forget non-realism, there's still lots to explore in that area too.
- vidarh 12y agoWhile I see the appeal in realism, I'm in this camp. I don't really play any games with "realistic" graphics. I'm sure they'd be fun, but I've just never gotten into them. I play old games, or "casual" games on my phone, neither type of games where realism is much of a factor. I have a game idea I hope I get time to do one day, but if I ever do, it will be 2d - on purpose - and somewhat pixelated, also on purpose. In part because I love some of the visual effects of pixel art. And realism would not even remotely be a priority for the graphics.
- z3phyr 12y agoFor me, video games not only serve as an entertainment package. They are a whole different worlds to me. I dream of a game which could bring me into alternate reality, with near perfect settings from the real world, with my own twist, and a game in which I will not respawn again, much like Rouglikes in UHD 3d. I am trying to make such a game, but its too hard to complete by myself in such a short lifetime :/
- radmuzom 12y agoGraphics 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.
- ansimionescu 12y agoWindows-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 12y agoSo 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 12y agoWere later versions of MMF somehow not backwards-compatible?
- Torn 12y agoNo idea; a quick Google tells me there were some compatibility issues http://community.clickteam.com/threads/34059-MMF-1-5-to-MMF2-Compatibility-Bug http://community.clickteam.com/threads/34059-MMF-1-5-to-MMF2...
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y agoHeh. 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 12y agoDo you know what happened to the project to redo GG2 in Python?
- Kronopath 12y agoThis 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
- Torn 12y agoRockPaperShotgun article on it: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/06/18/documentaryised-the-dream-game-13-years-in-the-making http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/06/18/documentaryised-t... TiGSource thread: http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=41361.0 http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=41361.0
- colkassad 12y agoI recommend people take a look. The video is indeed well-produced and the style reminded me of the director of Love Actually and About Time. It was not what I was expecting.
- azinman2 12y agoGame looks pretty cool actually from the video!
- Kronopath 12y agoYou can try it yourself, it's free: http://www.tobiasgame.co.uk/ http://www.tobiasgame.co.uk/
- louthy 12y agoAnd it ends with the Space Harrier theme! Massive pangs of nostalgia just started flowing through me.
- thisjepisje 12y agoThis game changes your screen resolution, if you don't want this you have to select 'windowed' in settings.exe.
- notastartup 12y agoThis 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
- ChuckMcM 12y agoThat 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 12y agoSimilar 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 :)
- fredleblanc 12y agoWith 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.
- AndyNemmity 12y agoI 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.
- meanJim 12y agoI'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.
- runn1ng 12y agoWell, it still didn't took as long as Duke Nukem Forever. But nearly.
- zackmorris 12y agoI, for one, applaud his effort :-)
- georgedrummond 12y agoI guess he didn't read "Lean Startup"
- Vektorweg 12y agoI 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.
- barbs 12y agoThat'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
- kimonos 12y agoWow! Two thumbs up for his dedication, hard work and patience!
- tbirdz 12y agoI'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 12y agoYep, 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.
- chondos 12y agoHe didn't spend 13 years making this. Being in prison 13 years is spending (or at the very least 40 hour weeks weeks may be considered spending). This was occasionally putting some time into something for 13 years. I dislike exaggerated link bait.
- VeejayRampay 12y agoThat'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.
- throw7 12y agoDang. 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
- guyy321 12y agoThis is awesome.
- xhamster 12y agoHe 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...