From a gamer to a game developer
Tuesday, August 8th, 2006Do note that game development, while I still enjoy it very much, is no longer my main interest. But because I’ve been and still am among other things a game developer until I have enough money for a bigger business, I thought to write about it for those who are interested.
Ever since I was like 6 - 8 I’ve been playing all kinds of games. Someday as a teen I decided to make a game design document just for fun. Then I got excited about it and went ahead and tried to contact via e-mail some big name game development companies if they’d like to have the design document which of course was responded to with “No”. That didn’t stop me as I just liked to design games whether they got implemented or not. Later on I started designing a simpler game than a MMORPG, yet it was very ambitious for someone who didn’t know how to program. That game was Battles of Norghan. I don’t remember if I had the intention to make it happen when I started designing it but at some point I started trying to get a team for it although I didn’t expect to find one and I thought I’d develop the game myself if I have to. Failing to find active programmers but succeeding to find a few volunteers (of which all but Scott Buckles became too inactive), I started self-educating myself programming and I chose C++ as my first programming language which I haven’t regretted. I made a few small games and other applications myself before I started programming Battles of Norghan. Soon it was confirmed that the game is going to be of commercial quality and so instead of using volunteers, I started hiring freelancers to do tasks which I’m not a master of, like art and sounds and I started focusing on the business side more. One of the mistakes I made early on the development is that I decided to roll my own game engine instead of using an existing, well tested and more robust one. While it didn’t take me way too long and turned out to be a good learning experience, the fact that it is a simple DirectX 9.0c wrapper one is now deeply rooted to Battles of Norghan and to change it to use a cross-platform and lower DirectX version game engine will require much work.
Later on with several years of extremely active programming experience, I became confident that I could greatly improve what is by many successful independent game developers considered to be the best publicly available 2D Windows game engine out there. The main problems of the original game engine are however that it isn’t cross-platform (for example Mac sales often amount to 50% of independent downloadable games’ direct sales) and it is much more difficult to use than SDL or almost pure DirectX wrappers which makes developing with it harder and take more time. The best side of it is that programs developed with it work in virtually every machine, even “ancient” ones. I was going to license it to other game developers so I could make it practically perfect instead of just doing whatever Mitorah Games will need in a timely manner. To read more about the greatly improved cross-platform version of that engine, the Mitorah Games Engine, go to http://www.mitorahgames.com/Mitorah-Games-Engine.html.