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game-making history
I did form another group, called Fusion Entertainment, with my friends, but they went hokey and pokey and didn't do anything. I also got my own webspace on Earthlink. http://home.earthlink.net/~lluivf/HTM/. It was fun. I got Visual C++ 4 standard a month before my birthday, thinking it would solve all my problems. It only added more problems. I soon found my very first Klik & Play game ever! It was ACTion Software's Pong game, it was sooooooo horrible (and still is). It gave me the first impression that, hey ... Klik & Play was a cheap thing made by idiots. Later on, I found a few Klik & Play games on PC Gamer CD, and heck, they were sooooooo horrible as well. I did vest some interest in this topic, make your own computer games easily, and I soon searched for some websites pertaining to this topic. The first few sites I found were Europress' never-updated K&P
site, the California (emf.net) never-updated site, and Silky's,
which was at www.snider.net at the time. I favored the emf.net site
more, and visited it often until I soon realized it was never going
to be updated. Again. I also downloaded the limited demo of K&P,
and didn't know how to use it. Upon visiting Silky's, I took a look
around in the libraries (never the wall), and everything was soooo
confusing. Then, without my knowing it, Silky's suddenly vanished. Boohoo!
I checked emf.net instead, and it pointed me to cei.net that time.
In September, I went to a computer swapmeet and found Klik &
Play CD. I jumped at the chance and paid $13 for it (later finding
it for $5.50). I made my very first experimental game. Deluxe
Pong. I then found the wall and introduced myself as "sc", with
lack of any other better nickname. I stayed around sporadically.
People like Jonathan Hill, Chris Perry, Mystion, et cetera weren't
there at the time. I think ... I tried making a few games too in "Fusion Entertainment." Things like Halloween Fright and Banana Hunter cropped up. Soon, I found myself alone, and headed out to form my own group, Epsilon Productions, on the 14th of October 1996. Only a friend (whom I kicked out without telling him) and my siblings were in it. I joined Amazing Productions at the time, because Rikus was begging for help in the conference room for Locked 5. I helped. We soon had a few ideas up our sleeves. Mystic Realms (who
had stolen graphics from Havoc's Fate .. which I immediately
apologized thereafter), Midnight (which was heavily inspired
by the great Brian Su's great Begone 2), and ... um ... dunno
what else. In mid-January, I changed my group's name to Goldfish
Productions, because some company named Epsilon already existed.
Ever wonder how Sira got started? On the 15th of February, I read one of David Willis' Walkerton stories. It was excellent. I thought I'd make something like that ... called Allied Command, with "The Blue Team" composed of Jimmy, Dana, Brent, Sira, and Ben. Adventure, love, action, drama. It sunk instantly, because I had other things to do. (btw, Sira did come from another game, Albion. I saw a screenshot of it, and one of the Iskai was named "Sira." There you have it!) IRC soon became an addiction to me late at night. I talked with people, especially one extraordinary young man named Marcello Bastea-Forte. He was friendly. Quite, actually ... I eventually joined his group Cellosoft on the ninth of March, around the time when James "Erstam" Dougherty also joined. I was inspired by his game "Race," which had a scrolling K&P racing game with a mouse pointer. (nothing to do with ethnicity.) I made a ton of mouse games :
... which was in the never-finished Cellosoft pack "Mouse Pack." Around that time my father asked me if I wanted anything. I asked
for The Games Factory. Yeah! Mid-March came, and so did TGF.
Well, not really. The Europress guys (as usual) screwed up and sent
me the demo version of it. We emailed Philip Chapman, who
was kind, sending us, without charge!, the real version of it. It
arrived about a week or two later. On March 30, I thought up a game to enter the K&P/C&C/TGF contest. Defender Sira, just like Commander Keen 5! It was my very first game in TGF. I procrastinated a lot in the early stages, for example, fit had very limited platform movement, so I didn't feel like doing it for a few days. Her initial drawing is still intact ... she was originally wearing a yellow shirt, but upon transferring the drawings to my K&P Goldfish drafts (containing a ton of GFP pictures and demos), it shifted palettes. Around late April I made #gfp on dalnet. :) On May 20, I also started creating Defender Sira stories
on paper. She's actually a 14-year-old Chinese girl living in Bristown,
somewhere in U.S.A. She's mostly formed after myself. Part of her
team up in space is Frank Banl, her love-interest, and Janici Akiraja,
a blue-haired alien that strangely resembles Rei Ayanami (or Ayanami
Rei?) from Gainax's popular anime
Neon Genesis Evangelion. I still wonder why someone dubbed
"Japanese" would have blue hair. Maybe they do? I thought their
hair was black. Right now I've got about a hundred pages lined up.
I started waving off to other games, making some demos, like Crashed and Space Mouse 2 ... Jonathan Hill and Anders Jensen-Urstad also join Goldfish Productions. For his first few months when Jonathan Hill joined Silky's, lots of people had pounded him for stealing other people's work and lying. I soon went back on track with Sira, releasing a few screenshots of her. I also started on a little thing called "Cellosoft Arcade," a project I thought that the entire Cellosoft team could work on together. In late June, Defender Sira kept crashing on itself, most notably the map portion. I think it had to do with having too many trees (backdrop objects). So I salvaged what I could and redid the map. It was a major pain in the rear, but it came through. Well, July came, and soon my parents swiped away my modem, because I wouldn't sleep early anymore. Because I was on the computer, chatting away with other people. Cheap. I also received my TI-83 graphing calculator, and made a lot of a roleplaying game called "Sira's RPG." Which was never finished. I released a demo of Defender Sira on 10 August 1997, just
one simple post .. went something like this : Sprite <[email protected]> True, Ultraviper, true ... I have a short demo of Defender Sira up, it's at http://home.earthlink.net/~lluivf/HTM/sira-net.zip (zip-ex, 1.2mb). The debugging menu event lines have been disabled. Let me know what you think, please!
The result was astonishing .. lots of people actually liked it. ^^;; Samkim offered to make some MIDIs, a few people bashed The Secret of the Lost Statue (not that I liked it when that happened, but the game was Merely Mediocre), and on and on. In fact, there's a sequel to that game coming out. I hope Brian Su makes it actually worth my while playing it. Have you noticed that there were no lost statues in The Secret of the Lost Statue? How dumb can that get... ahem... Around the beginning of September, TGF went postal. Whenever I tried manipulating a new active object via the event editor (ex. make it invisible!) the thing would crash on me. This was about the second time TGF twisted Sira, and I was furious. So, I dissolved Goldfish Productions in January. Then, around Spring 1998, Silky's vanished again. This time, for good. After a serious server crash that wiped out everything plus a disgusted attitude towards all the lame stupid users out there who flooded the Wall, she didn't bother to put it up again (or her server, I guess ^^;;). And heck... the wall hasn't changed a bit since. Defender Sira has undergone a ton of changes lately... see its page now for more information! Lately, things have changed. The old regulars still frequent the halls of #k&p and sometimes the Wall. Some AOL graduates, Sean Poling, Ryan Sadwick, et al., have started a really excellent site, called the Click Café. Silky's was restarted once by Rikus Kras, Craig Jardine, and others, but soon went down again for some reason. Rikus then began the dead The Daily Click, and is now back at his good ol' home at AP Zone. David Willis no longer hangs around, but draws a great online comic strip called It's Walky!. Martin Braid comes on too, Chris Perry as well, Marcello of course, Cragmyre left (marriage, I'm guessing), Samkim is into music but still comes on the Wall, and the list goes on... And, of course, lots of the K&P regulars use ICQ. I spent my last days in the K&P scene helping other people with the click suite out, on the ClickTeam and FPG forums. I don't make that many games (quite obvious :-)). I stopped "supporting" the Klik & Play set of programs online because it became too time-consuming. It was certainly not my job to help others out in what limited time I already had, and the programs, which were meant to be fun, no longer were fun for me to use. Hopefully I'll learn real programming later, or get back to my game projects (which I'll probably make over the summer: I've a backlog of ideas). For now, my game-making history has come to an end, as this was my last post on the ClickTeam forums and Wall: So long, Klik & Play community, and thanks for the ride! What can I say? (You could already see it coming from the way the MMF FAQ's been run down!) It's been a swell time getting to know each and every one of you for the past four years. I've been an operator at #k&p, a proud member of the once-grand The Wall and Silky's Mature Wall, an editor of the Click Café, developer at the ClickTeam forums, a member of the Fusion Programmers Guild, and the co-administrator of the Jamagic Programmers Guild 3D. For me, though, it's time to move on. I must focus on real life
now — I have many good friends I need to spend time with and
I have to concentrate on testing (this time of year is especially
hard on students, as many Americans can attest). I will still maintain
my resource pages, make a demo or two, try my best to maintain the
MMF FAQ, hang around the FPG forums as much as I can to help with
the opening of the JPG3D, and perhaps hang around the ClickTeam
forums to see the new Jamagic, but I can no longer remain
dedicated and commited as much as I had been over last summer. K&P
just wasn't as much fun as it used to be. So, I give my greetings
to everyone out there using ClickTeam products, including:
My advice to any and all K&P newbies: respect others and they'll respect you. And remember to have fun with these products. Sometimes competition against those already established in the community can make you neglect what matters in real life. I've been there once. But whatever you do, klik, play, and make some magic. |
Before
that, though, in 1994 I created a games newsletter called Information
Superhighway. It was pretty stale ... old news, etc., because
I didn't have internet access at that time. It died in December,
but soon revived again in January 1996, when I started receiving
PC Gamer magazines. This could be a source for computer news!
So I started churning them out, until it died again (due to everyone's
lack of interest) in April 1997. IRQ Design (which is supposed to
be similar to the British company "DMA Design") was created as my
own group, for myself, for the newsletter. 
I
started my game-developing passion around June/July 1996, when I
tinkered around in Crack dot Com's game Abuse, which I bought
because there weren't any better platform games at that time. I
was peeping around in the directories, when I hit something called
"Lisp" files. (Lisp, in this case, is a programming language that
actually means List something something ... Maybe processing?) I
made my very first game, it was called "Shootout". I made it under
IRQ Design. Then I went on and created oh-so-crappy (but NOT crappy
for me at the time) games in Abuse like Bash, Deviator, and
... uh... something else. More and more I wished it could be advanced,
because Abuse was nice, had lighting effects, but was limited
in necessary things. 
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