About 28 years ago, a classmate of mine was in the library running a QBasic program. I thought it was cool and asked where he got it. He said he MADE it. My brain promptly exploded. This teenage kid wrote a program on a school computer during free-study time. I found an instant hunger for wanting to make my own program, although I knew nothing about programming. That didn’t matter though; I knew how videogames operated and I wanted to make a videogame.
Early on in life, I realized that card games, videogames, board games, basically games in general, follow a simple recipe: Develop mechanics (rules) in an otherwise chaotic environment and witness the “fun” that cooks up from the drama your rules/restrictions dish out! I created many games for me and my friends to play as a child. If you ever meet me, ask me about “Croquet Race” from my childhood, it’s a hoot.
After my brain calmed down, I started asking my classmate questions and within a week was off to learn QBasic. I’d say I “learned how to program” but that would be a lie. These programs lacked formatting, naming conventions, and violated so many software principles I give my old self an failing grade, lol. Nevertheless, 28 years ago my journey began to live in the world of computing.
Law & Orderly Medicine
Before I ended up in computer science, I was planning to get a career in medicine or law. (I laugh at that these days) Once I saw my creations coming to life, I never looked back. It was the CPU life for me! I began to learn and build, spending my afternoons after school at my family’s computer with a stack of floppy disks so I could take them back and forth to school. Most of my programming was exploratory; I wanted to see what QBasic could do.
Soon though, I was downloading other people’s QBasic games and learning how they worked. So it wasn’t long before I started thinking about my own games. In the end I would end up starting 3 games: Star Chaser, a Simon clone, and MicroGolf.
Fast forward 28 years and unearthing the code was much like an archeological dig; the projects died suddenly and were left in an unfinished state. So the first thing I did was dust off my old QBasic skills and began to fix the programs so they were at least operable.
Star Chaser, 28 years later
First up was Star Chaser. A simple 2D ASCII Art game. It was unfinished because the last level I wanted to perform in 2.5D (ray casting) to simulate a 3D “Save the planet” level. However, as I learned, QBasic is SLOW to process and ray casting wasn’t going to cut it. As a result, Star Chaser got abandoned with the intention to port it to another language that could handle ray casting. After all, I was also learning PASCAL at the time. Instead I turned towards making my Simon clone and MicroGolf game.
Unfortunately, I never did get the opportunity to port Star Chaser, mostly due to my spaghetti coding that almost made it better off to re-write from scratch. It happens when learning, and wasn’t the last time…
Simon Clone
Growing up, I always liked the game Simon. It’s a simple man vs. machine memory game. The goal being to get the highest score you can. Pretty straight forward and simple. However, much like Star Chaser, I abandoned this game as well. Not because of limitations, but because I was young and simply moved on as I learned more. Much like Star Chaser the codebase was deplorable and not portable. It never was all together; I had the title in one program, the game in another, no organization, but I managed to mimic the basic Simon mechanics and turned my QBasic skills from programming to programming art. Soon I was drawing partial circles and otherwise making clean programming art. Learning how to make art with the geometry calls was fun, but time consuming. Kinda like today’s shaders.
Ultimately Simon doesn’t come together and instead I began work on my QBasic Magnum Opus: MicroGolf.
MicroPutt!
A play on words, MicroPutt was simply a miniature golf simulator (ON A MICROCHIP, GET IT?!) in which you could create and share levels (You could fit several courses on a floppy disk, WITH THE GAME!). I fell in LOVE with this game. But it was at that time I didn’t understand certain geometry functions (I think it was Arc Tangent I needed) and couldn’t explain it properly to my teachers to get the answer. I grew very frustrated. I needed to better understand the math required before I could finish my game.
So I decide to shelve the game until I’m able to complete my PASCAL course and solve my issue, maybe even port the game. And in that was my mistake. By the time I returned to my spaghetti-code MicroPutt Game, I had actually learned how to program (a little) and grew so frustrated one night I deleted the entire game file in a fit of rage at the younger me that didn’t know how to program. And with that MicroPutt, what could have been the first of many Delightful Games, was gone.
I regretted what I had done, but also learned a valuable lesson. Sometimes it’s better to have a fresh start with software. Something that stands true even today. Sometimes the old has to be torn down to make way for the new.
New Beginnings
Maybe this explains why I modeled Spaceschuter McGavin after golf, but all I know is that I don’t want to go out on a sad note. Do I wish I finished these games, or still had the original files to MicroPutt? Darn tootin’, but that mistake and those broken dreams never went to waste. I kept them with me and it has delivered me here, today, at Delightful Games. If were I given a choice to relive my life, I wouldn’t change a thing, because I would never forgive myself if I hadn’t landed just where I am today 28 years later. Peace my friends!
