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My Story, Part 3: My First Games

6 years ago3,985 words

This is a continuation of the story of my creative journey, which started with ∞ this post ∞. In this one, I talk about the first games that I made!

In secondary school in Australia, we had to buy one of these huge, clunky graphing calculators for maths:



I read somewhere that some places actually still require those, despite the prevalence of infinitely more powerful mobile phones. That's stupid, if true. I suppose technology's advancing so fast that curricula struggle to keep up. Curricula. What a common word that's not!

It was possible to do some really basic 'programming' on these calculators, and since I had mine with me much of the time anyway, I tried to do just that. I made some simple text-based adventure thing, where you played as a character called LONE WOLF (based on the one I used in Neverwinter Nights; this was also the name of the game), and could choose to battle goblins and dragons and such.

Essentially, the gameplay loop would involve some main menu where you could choose to FIGHT, SHOP, or look at your STATUS. If you chose to FIGHT, you chose a location (FOREST, CAVE, etc), then one of a number of possible opponents (GOBLIN, WOLF, ORC, ..., DRAGON; I suppose they were all just politely standing there waiting to be fought). You could choose any opponent from an unlocked area, but they were of varying difficulty, and new areas were unlocked by beating the boss. 'Battles' essentially involved just selecting ATTACK, which did damage to the opponent and to you until someone ran out of HP. When you won, you got money, which could be used in the SHOP to improve your WEAPON or ARMOUR. You could also LEVEL UP from the EXP you got from battles.

The final boss was Michael Jackson, from what I remember... because I became obsessed with him for like a year around this time, not because of any of the supposed criminal stuff that was in the news around this time. I learned how to do the moonwalk and everything!! A strange thing to remember, that.

Oh so very sadly, this game, like much of my early stuff, has been lost to the sands of time. At least, the TI-83 version has. What a loss for the world.



I did however start trying to translate these skills to actual programming on my computer, largely, I think, so then I could write scripts for my Neverwinter Nights modules, which used a scripting language based on C++. So, I taught myself C++ from online tutorials, fairly quickly from what I remember (though it took me a few months to fully 'get' programming concepts).

The first thing I did was it was make a version of that LONE WOLF text-based thing, which I still have; you can download it ∞ here ∞, if you're curious, though it's extremely tedious and the damage calculations seem weirdly broken, as I found from trying to play it myself just now. I didn't complete it - I couldn't - so I don't know how far this version goes. I'd recommend against trying to find out though. Time's too precious to waste on such a thing!



I don't remember why or how I made the jump to Flash. I know that around this time, I'd spend lunchtimes in the computer room with the people I knew, browsing sites like Newgrounds, so I must have learned that those games and animations were made in Flash, and I somehow acquired it and learned how to use it myself, teaching myself ActionScript 2 from online tutorials. Strange that this section of my life is mostly a blur.

I don't remember much of the Flash content that I was exposed to around this time. I remember Weebl, whose various animations - including the well-known badger-badger-badger thing - appealed to me and my friends for a while. I seem to remember Magical Trevor being particularly notable. There were also people like David Firth, who I mentioned earlier, and I remember something called... Madness Combat? Something like that? These aggressive, dark, creepy, violent things that my friends seemed to love but which I watched reluctantly, thinking "this doesn't feel right, I'm not enjoying this". Hmm. I also remember a guy called something like Legendary Frog, who made some Final Fantasy animations? Seems I mostly remember Flash animations rather than games. I don't think I ever particularly liked Flash games, though I used Flash because of its accessibility. I remember Flash 'RPG' Sonny - and its predecessor which was about ninjas, whose name I can't recall (Sinjid...?) - but I think those came later because I remember feeling that they were 'competing' with MARDEK. There were also those Epic Battle Fantasy games, or whatever they were called, which people have mentioned in comparison to MARDEK, though I've never actually played any of them.

I wonder what the creators of those things are up to these days... though I'm not going to check for weird mental reasons. I hope their lives turned out better than mine has. I know that both Weebl and David Firth got their animations on the actual television here in the UK, at least.

As with everything, I dove in at the deep end with Flash before fully cementing fundamentals. Well, sort of; the first game that I made was some kind of side-scrolling shooter thing, probably based on a tutorial... though instead of using a spaceship shooting lasers like in the tutorial, I made it a dragon that flew and could breathe fire.

...I thought I had a version of it available, but it's gone, sadly. Yet another of my things Old Father Time has subsumed into his gargantuan bumcrack.

A derivation of that dragon flier game based on a Draco System species called Cyber Orteks came later, but first, I tried to make some RPGs, as they were my favourite genre. The first, from what I remember, was based on Yalortism, and it, too, is lost. Then maybe there was another, based on Pokémon? An early precursor to Beast Signer and Miasmon, I suppose. I don't have that one anymore either. A genuine shame, for me at least, since it worked and everything, in a primitive kind of way. I don't even remember what it was called, or what its setting was, or anything.

I do still have this, though, which I think may have come next? I'm not sure; this dates from late 2004 to early 2005, though. It didn't have a proper title.



"...adventurers". That was GUY's next and final word, as I'm sure you were desperate to know.

It's poorly-coded, at least some of the tile graphics are stolen (from Final Fantasy III for the NES, I think), they're all poorly-scaled, distorting their pixels, and there are only a handful of these screens before it suddenly ends. There's no plot or anything, you're just some random knight with a customisable face that is given a quest by 'the king' to go to a place called Jetek Village, a location name which seemed to appear in a bunch of things I made back then for no particular reason.

There were battles, which looked like this:



They weren't turn-based; instead, you could move around with the arrows, and either attack or block using different keys. The enemy AI was really, really bad though, so it didn't work very well! Also, look at that lovely background that I painted aaaall by myself. Isn't that easy on the eyes?

I think the human character only looks as proportional as he does because I traced an image of a suit of armour I found via Google. I feel ashamed about that now! I then went on to derive character models for Fig Hunter from this one; I'll get to that soon.

Most notably, it had this stupid feature where your limbs could be severed if the enemy's weapon came into contact with them. It wasn't because I liked gore at all - I didn't - but because I wanted to see if I could code such a thing? I seem to have made some cognitive separation between this and the gory violence I was afraid of, which is... interesting, and which manifested in some later projects too.



It didn't even work very well, with the severed limbs just instantly appearing on the 'floor', which was too high above the ground, the moment they were hit. Most 'battles' with this wonderful feature turned on ended in like a second when the enemy instantly chopped off your head. I wonder why I didn't continue with this game? It would have made me millions, for sure.



Next, and far more notably, was Fig Hunter, in early 2005. This was the first proper iteration of an RPG engine I built using my own intuition, and which eventually became - or at least led to - MARDEK's engine. Fig Hunter was based on the Neverwinter Nights module of the same name, which I mentioned earlier, where your customisable protagonist trained with Fignar the insane dwarf to become a Fig Hunter etc. It's... interesting how my idea of 'stories' back then was so... impersonal, I suppose. Lacking, empty. Meaningless. But I suppose that was influenced by growing up immersing myself primarily in video games, where "The King wants you to slay some bandits, adventurer!" was a passable plot, rather than literature, which is more in-depth. These 'stories' were more about what people were - a 'knight', an 'adventurer', 'the king' - rather than who they were on a personal level. Different to how I'd see things these days.

As an aside, I have this picture of a Fig Hunter from this period (or rather from November 2004, which was a bit before):



I really like that face and those proportions. They are amazing. That fig-holding hand would reach his knee, at least. Fig Hunters wielded daggers that omitted orange light because figs were apparently afraid of orange light. Apparently. Here's a random fact: I have never actually eaten a fig, or seen one in real life. So that purple with yellowish-green flesh depiction of a fig that I used for years probably doesn't bear much resemblance to the real thing.

I also have this picture of Dardek, the lizardman that I mentioned earlier:



I'm including that mostly because I forgot I ever drew it, but also because I seemed to like using that character a lot during this period even though he was as fleshed-out as a sheet of paper crudely cut into the shape of a bone. (Also, I think that image is particularly poorly-drawn. Sort of embarrassing.)

Anyway, the Fig Hunter community website that people might be familiar with came later, but I originally acquired the www.fighunter.com domain so then I'd have a place to showcase this game. Have a look at this:



239 hits. Donate button.

Have you ever read any of your old online posts from years and years ago? Maybe you should. It's such a lovely feeling, trying to reconcile your current image of your Self with the words you read, acknowledging the inescapable fact that you were the one who wrote them. Bonus points if you realise you've not changed quite as much as you might like since then, that some written quirks from then are still with you and that your overall character/voice hasn't changed dramatically. Or maybe everyone does go through some kind of metamorphosis and it's just me that's stagnated.

(I think that white box there was a Flash banner which is broken on this archived snapshot of the site.)

As for the game itself, though... I just played it a bit, and it's actually more complete than - and not as terrible as - I thought. It's... interesting. I don't remember if I've ever posted it online - though I know I've at least posted some derived versions somewhere, since Ikept trying to change the story to the degree that they essentially ended up as separate games - but I'm probably not going to post it now. Disappointing, I know.

As I'd come directly from Neverwinter Nights, it seemed obvious to me that the player should be able to design and customise their character, so the game starts with a character creation thing. I made this lovely person.



The character graphics don't look too different to MARDEK (if anything, the faces are more detailed), and were derived from that knight from earlier; I think the male and female used exactly the same legs. As such, the proportions aren't as shockingly bad as they might have been had I just drawn from imagination. The animations are terrible though (not that you can see them in screenshots).

There's a walkaround field, using vector graphics rather than pixel sprites. The menu - which I've just opened here - has a lot of options.



I actually quite like the look and colour of the buttons. It's quite clean and tidy, I think, and I find those soft, bright browns pleasing even now. But the controls are awkward, like in an early version of the first two MARDEK chapters, since you have to click these buttons with the mouse but you control the character with the keyboard.

There are NPCs, with dialogue.



That was my attempt at drawing a face back then. It could have been worse, considering I knew nothing of anatomy or digital painting, and I don't think I used a reference. My understanding of the form of the features was lacking, though.

Here's a sample of the riveting dialogue, from an NPC standing just outside your house when you start:



IT'S JUST SO WITTY AND CLEVER AND SHOULD WIN AWARDS.

By which I mean it makes me cringe. I mean, I get what I was trying to do, but it's heavy-handed, unnatural; the whole thing breaks the fourth wall with a sledgehammer rather than winking at it knowingly, and there are a lot of non-sequiturs that make it seem like there's no awareness that these are actually people with minds. It seems like it was written by a socially inept teenager, because it was.

And yet there are far fewer years between this and MARDEK than there are between MARDEK and now, so I made MARDEK in a very similar state of mind. I haven't actually played MARDEK in years, but if I were to try to, I imagine I'd cringe with deep embarrassment at lines that I thought were clever, deep or funny at the time. Especially knowing how many other people had read them.

Though in saying that, I recently reread that ∞ Divine Dreams thing I made mere months ago ∞, and I find the dialogue in that just as embarrassing and inept. Perhaps I'm just not a good writer. Or perhaps I'm too self-critical. Or both.

Getting back to Fig Hunter, the obligatory combat system had a couple of features I find interesting to look back on. You could dual-wield weapons, and when it was your turn you could select between four different stances which altered your stats for your current action, lasting until your next turn. Each changed the animations of your character... though it's not obvious from these screenshots (they're both in attacking stance) and I should have taken better ones. I can't be bothered going back to do that now though, so you'll have to just imagine it!



I'm impressed by this lingon robot boss thing, which changed the colour of its arm particles to the element of the skills that it used, and which attacked using four-hit combos.



There was no real story to the game, though. You were aiming to become a 'Fig Hunter' for no particular reason, and that involved travelling into some random cave, defeating that lingon robot, and warping through a portal to an entirely different planet. Each planet had its own navigable world map like those of the old Final Fantasies (though far uglier):



I'd planned for there to be several of these worlds, which was just ridiculous. Being a teenage boy, I was excited by the thought of some epic adventure, like the ones from my influences, but gave little thought to the details or purpose of the journey. I wanted to make a game that was huge without considering whether that was at all a good thing.

In line with that, the game included this:



"Final Fantasies have card minigames!", I thought. "So I should add one too! I can't think of any ideas for my own... so I should just steal Triple Triad from Final Fantasy VIII! That's an okay thing to do!!"

It's interesting how it all works exactly as Triple Triad should, though. I suppose it wasn't a difficult game to code at all.

(I did try to design a more original 'carp battle' minigame instead, where you used fish instead of cards (so clever and funny!!!), but it doesn't seem to have got beyond a few notes in a .txt file.)

This is interesting too:



So this character must have existed as early as this game? I'm surprised by that; I don't remember him being in it at all, or what role he plays, if any. Hmm, maybe he was from a throwaway Neverwinter Nights module? I think he was, actually, and his name - "Muriance Bross", I think - was generated by the game - "Emela Jard" from the Governance de Magi thing was another that the random name list spat out - which bothers me, though it's not like I expected to be using these characters in MARDEK years later! Shows how little thought I put into the process back then, though.

I got those screenshots from playing Fig Hunter for just a few minutes just now, but the game has hours of gameplay before it just abruptly stops. It's not like the story stops - there isn't one, really - but rather you just reach a dead end where there's supposed to be a dungeon, but it's not there. Here's a weirdly microscopic screenshot of a later bit - on the second planet - where you have other party members:



There's Dardek!! How exciting!!! One of his swords is burning with a persistent fire particle effect, which is an interesting detail I don't remember doing in later games.

(Eerily, that file - from 13 years ago - used almost exactly the same naming convention as the ones I just made, unintentionally. A not-exactly-pleasant reminder that my mind and the mind that made that are one and the same.)

Also, they're fighting Lupin, the werewolf. He led the Wolf Bandits, and he was a villain.

It was interesting playing this game for a few minutes so then I could write about it here, and it awoke a desire within me to remake it, or to use the skills that I have now to make a similar experience. "I really want to make something where you can roam around a dungeon and equip things on your character and they show on their model! I'll do that right now!!", I thought. I had to resist the urge to dive into some random new idea. But the actual experience of this game wasn't exactly fun. Movement was sluggish, and I was reminded of how tedious and unappealing random battles are.

So much of our positive regard for games from yesteryear comes from the fondness of recognition, of memory; it seems that memories are often pleasant just because they're memories. I know I 'fondly remember' times that weren't actually pleasant to live through. If you take off the nostalgia glasses, though, it becomes apparent that game design has come a long way since gameplay like this was popular.

[Note: I wrote the first draft of this weeks ago, and in the meantime I did end up jumping into ∞ a project ∞ partly inspired by this, when I really shouldn't have done. Oh well!]



The soundtrack for Fig Hunter was my first attempt at composing since having piano lessons (before the Rambles etc I linked to earlier, but after the handful of things I made for Neverwinter Nights modules before I understood anything about music). Here's the oldest piece from the soundtrack in my archive, a generic village theme:

Village

It's... functional, and bland. Like not exactly tasty porridge. We'll probably end up revisiting this piece later on in this gruelling trudge of a post series, as I decided for sentimental reasons to use it as the basis of other village musics that I composed for different games. It's obviously made by a novice, but it's not entirely incoherent, so that's something?

I have ten pieces of music for Fig Hunter. I remember being fond of this next one at the time, which played in some areas on the second planet, a forest world. It shows what I considered to be the peak of my abilities back then, which wasn't high.

Ehaiah

It seems to be weirdly focused in one ear in my headphones for some reason.

And here's one of two battle themes, specifically for battling against a villain called Lupin, who led the Wolf Bandits and was also a werewolf:

Lupin Battle

It quotes the theme of Lupin, the villainous werewolf who led the Wolf Bandits, which I linked to all those many years ago in the previous post.

It's sort of active, mildly jazzy, and it has a semblance of structure to it. I suppose that could be said of much of this old music in general. "It's not good, but I can see that he at least had some ideas and was trying to execute them"? Something like that. I tried!



The next post will be about Deliverance!