Clearly, the game I'm building has lineage that traces back to the early arcades. And there's some pretty heavy influence going back to combat sims on home computers. I remember playing a submarine simulator on an acquaintance's Mac years and years ago. I don't recall the name of the simulator - GATO is about the right timeframe, but Wikipedia says it wasn't a Mac game. Maybe Sub Battle Simulator?
Of course, there was Seawolf, which was an arcade game, but I'm not considering that an influence.
The arcade game I had in mind, of course is Battlezone, the 1980 vector shooter. The KLOV page has some good footage of the game being played, and several features that I haven't got around to implementing yet, like:
- sound effects - player movement
- sound effects - new enemy in range
- HUD - targeting reticle that "locks on" to a target
- half-height obstacles - block movement, do not block shots
Thinking back, I think that I spent the July 4th weekend of 1994 tinkering around with making a Battlezone clone, using C (C++?), Visual Studio, and Fastgraph. I didn't get a lot done that weekend, but I did get a parallax background displayed. That seemed like a lot back then. 19 years later, I've looped around, and done what, back then, was the hard stuff. Maybe this week, I'll get the skydome working. I suspect I still have the hard drive with the assets and code for that stuff, but they wouldn't be useful, even if I could spin the drives up and get the data off - that stuff was probably 8-bit, and designed for a 640x480 display, at the highest. So, I'll start from scratch, and make something that visually works with my current implementation, and that'll be good.
Over this weekend, and mostly coming from a different context, I've been thinking about Malcolm Gladwell's claim that you need to spend ten thousand hours doing something to become good at it. I don't know how many hours I've put into game development in the past 19 years - if I count 40 hours a week, working for 14 years in the industry, that easily knocks me over thirty thousand hours, but I hesitate to count all of that. Still, going back to Battlezone, and thinking of what I accomplished when i was much younger, compared to what I did this weekend, even with a bunch of other stuff going on, I'm clearly much more productive.
Oh, and it's a lot easier to make games today than it was two decades ago. Back then, Mode X was black magic.
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