I've been rummaging through my old projects, and I thought it might be interesting to give a quick pictorial history of the games I've made.

I'm annoyed that I don't have anything to show for my really early stuff on the 8-bit and 16-bit machines. I purged my old cassettes and floppies in a fit of madness some time ago. My first published game was a type-in listing in Your Computer magazine (£50!), but frustratingly it was in one of the issues which is missing from this archive (some time in 1986).

The earliest game code I can find is a little Wolfenstein-style raycasting thingy for the Ruputer wristwatch computer:

But let's start in 1997, when I joined the games industry as a programmer at Criterion...


Redline Racer


Sub Culture

I wrote the assembly language transform & lighting code for the new SIMD instruction sets that were just appearing. This was in the days of the 3DFX Voodoo, so software rendering was starting to be phased out. I was glad I had the chance to do it before those days were gone.

Then Criterion started up an experimental small downloadable games division, called Fiendish Games. This was a fantastic opportunity for me - each game had one artist and one programmer working on it. Still twice as many people as I'd like, but closer to my ideal model than the big games.


Tower of the Ancients

Tower started life as a 2-week demo by one of the Criterion programmers. I jazzed up the scoring system, then just went to town on the bells & whistles. Motion blur! Bump mapping! Block physics! And so forth. I also did some of the 2D artwork, including, childishly, enhancing Adam's membrum virile in the loading screen's image of the Sistene Chapel ceiling.

Then some dues had to be paid:


Poker


Mah Jongg

It's not all glamour in the games industry.

At that point, Criterion decided it didn't want to be in the downloadable games business any more, and Fiendish spun off as Small Rockets.

First up in the new company was Star Monkey


Star Monkey

Up until Ancient Frog, this is the game I was most proud of, and the only one I played after it had been released. It's a very old school one-hit-and-you're-dead shoot-em-up, with oodles of alpha blending and lighting tricks. It shipped with the in-game level editor (disabled, but in a trivially re-enableable way).



Star Monkey editor

You could write a complete new shoot-em-up using these tools. I don't think anybody ever tried.

Then came my big mistake. My friend AD approached me and said "Peter Molyneux wants me for a new game he's starting. Would you like to be lead programmer on it?"

What I said was "OK, sounds interesting."

What I should have said was "No! No! A thousand times no! I'd rather move to the other side of the planet and leave the games industry forever!"

Still, I got there in the end.


The Movies

In contrast to Star Monkey, this is a game that I never played at all. (At least, not the version that existed at the time it got released.) A horrible experience, cramming in everything that the games industry is famous for doing wrong. I'll have to do a post about it some time...

So anyway, I started working on stuff just for me.



Europa

A hopelessly ambitious game, now abandoned but still simmering in my mind. I did at least get the basis of a good game engine out of it.



Underground

This came closer to being releasable. I'm pleased with the look of it, and the city map generator, and particularly the London Underground Automatic Station Name Generator. But despite being playable, I never succeeded in nailing the 'fun' part. So it sits languishing on my hard drive waiting for inspiration. Again, it considerably advanced my engine (particularly the 2D & markup stuff), so not utterly wasted time.

So I started on Frog.


frog.exe

Initially developing on my phone (a Windows Mobile device), but soon switching to PC.

But this wasn't paying the bills, and I fancied a change of country. New Zealand beckoned, and a brand new career creating digital interactives for museums.


Interactive Floor


Interactive Table


Build A Dolphin


Sound Chamber


Climate Simulator (with me for scale!)

Quick hiccup to write a patch for MAME to send the display list from vector games to the sound card, so you can hook up an oscilloscope and see them as they originally appeared:


OscilloMAME

Meanwhile, the Mac/PC incarnation of Frog was proceeding very slowly.


Frog (PC)

It was working as a game, but the graphics were taking me forever. I wanted it to look good on 1920x1200 monitors, and still work at 800x600, so not only was all the source artwork at ridiculously high resolution, the levels were also constructed in layers which could resize (dynamically at that!) to any aspect ratio. Looked lovely, but the race was on between the game and my increasingly pregnant wife, and there was no way I was going to finish it before I had a newborn baby on my hands.

So I returned to its mobile phone roots. Only this time, something a bit sexier. The iPhone looked like the perfect platform - it was rapidly establishing itself as a gaming device, it was perfectly suited to a game whose only action involved dragging things about the screen, and with a fixed (and relatively low) resolution, I'd be able to simplify the levels enough to actually finish it. The only question was, would it be powerful enough?


Ancient Frog (iPhone)

Long story short: Yes.