Chapter 5 - Adding ingredients I loved to the cauldron.

The first game I got into was not actually a PC game, but rather the oldies my dad put on a CD-ROM for me to play with. The CD-ROM was packed with emulators and old copies of obsoleted abandonwares, such as The Incredible Machines, The Oregon Trail, Peanuts: Math and Numbers, Jumpstart First Grade and Second Grade.

These games are what placed me on a track to gaming. But what exactly happened that made me jumped on a bandwagon on a road to game development? The answer is none other than Blizzard's WarCraft III: The Reign of Chaos.

Prior to that, I started playing my first PC game, Sid Meier's Civilization III. It taught me the basics of turn-based strategy, the history of mankind, how to change the tides by strategically placing units, towns, and colonies at the right spots, and how to engage in trading with others. Everything else is just, meh, I'm not really into that stuff.

Then moving on from Civ III, I started playing RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 for PC, and SimCity 4. These games taught me how to achieve the achieveable and get rewards for it by working with what I got in hand. That's open-ended for you. To me, it's more like building/simulation, where you interact with something, and get a reaction from it.

Now, with the strategy and building in hand, mashing the ingredients up, and we get WarCraft III: RoC. Here's where the magic comes around. As I'm playing real-time strategy games, I started to understand the meaning of formulating a plan from the start. What actions should I need to do in order to do something in the future? What do I need to build in order to survive? This course of action is what led me to like playing real-time strategy games, and also placed a seed in my mind.

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Now, the magic is activating. The seed has grown in onto me, and I feel like I wanted to put in my passion for playing real-time strategy games into my creation. A dead creation, so to say.

Here's what I came up with while I'm starting to lose faith in mankind for not being able to provide useful feedback from my last experiment. I'll copy/paste them below:
[quote]

1. Any ideas are sufficient, regardless of it being mediocre, lame, or awesome.
2. I have an RTS planned out. I only have this demo, along with the source code provided, completed. The goal is to make it as a game, according to test-driven development rules that were set before the beginning stages of programming.
3. Timeframe: 8 months or more. As much work I can get from my schedule while in the police force. Highly unlikely that I get at least 2 hours or more of work from this.[/quote]

When I ask for ideas, I meant for people to think up of anything, any game themes, or any run-on sentences, such as "Once upon a time...", or "Look, there's something over there!", etc.

Rumaging through what I have in mind, a pixel-based RTS game, with no prior training in game A.I., and have conscription on my schedule, which cuts down so many hours of man-work on this hobby. I like to play building and simulating games, so I have "Buildings" and "Simulation" on my mind.

And then, boom! An idea came through to me, all by itself.

I now introduce to you a new game, in the next chapter.



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Chapter 6 - Pixavive Survival, Alpha version.

That's it, the game finally has an actual structure as a game, however small and feature-lacking it may be.

The first version, with the notice shown here, didn't have what I called it a "game." It didn't have a title, no options, no tutorials, or anything else other than the "core" of the game. What is the "core"?, you may ask. A game core is a minimalistic game, consists of nothing but the game. If you clicked on the link given above, download the ZIP file, extract the JAR file, and execute it, you will see what it means as a "game core." Programs like these are easily labeled as "demo," but I think differently. A "demo" is technically a program that "demonstrates" a technique others have made during the course of development.

Now, what's so special about this "first version" I have here? It's easy! For the first time, I have given life to a worthless application. I have given it something it can hold dearly on to, and that itself gives motivation and determination for the developer (which is me, of course!) to continue writing code for it. By writing more code to an already dead project, but with new vigor, that dead project is no longer dead. I've revived it!

That's it, the significance is that.

From here on out, I'll talk more about the technical details about this "game," and touch upon the shortcomings of this "game's" evolution.


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To be continued...

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