So there is a good story behind this announcement. Learning to program was something I decided I would not be doing somewhere around 1997 after completing a FORTRAN class and shortly taking a Java class not long thereafter.
The instructor for the Java class didn't know Java (fairly enough as it had not been out for long) but promised he would read the book 2 weeks ahead of us and be ready in advance.
By the second class he hadn't kept his promise and so I decided this wasn't going to work for me and dropped out.
Additionally I had actually already a fairly intense interest in being an artist for video games having created quite a few pieces of art for DOOM and DOOM II including being a project leader for a 19 level add on pack for DOOM II for my BBS Business that ran a 16 line multiplayer DOOM service called IMAGE BBS.
In 1996 Quake came out and the last nail in that coffin was firmly hammered in - or so I thought at the time.
The ability to do Quake skins was the creative outlet I was looking for.
The process for learning to create art for video games was not exactly 'easy' at the time. You were limited to a very specific 256 color palette, you had to draw 'in the lines'. Your texture had a maximum size of 256x256 pixels. Even with these limitations I (and many others) were able to create some very amazing skins (or textures) for the players to wear while running around in Quake such as my Alien skin.
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| "Alien" Quake Skin done in 1997 |
So after figuring out the process I decided I would share what I had learned and I quickly became a minor celebrity amongst the Quake modification community running the Skintutor site at PlanetQuake.
In part this celebrity probably gained me the recognition of a small team of artists and programmers who were trying to go professional. They invited me to join them and eventually I became the team lead / project leader and we pitched a game concept to Ritual Entertainment and Activision to show our creative skills off int he hopes of creating an add on pack for SiN.
Amazingly we won the contract and in doing so our startup game company 2015 was created. Due to financial disagreements with our business "guy" I left the company shortly thereafter and continued my pursuit of art privately.
Most of this was done with "mod" groups. Small collections of artist and programmers making modifications of existing games to hone their skills and prove they were worthy to be hired by a game company based off the work they had done.
Amongst these I made contributions to Action Quake II, Hexen CTF, NightWatch for HalfLife, The Dark Brotherhood for Oblivion, and quite a few others.
Eventually I was able to work with some programmers and complete several indie level games for hand held platforms. Eligo, Gravblox, and WizardWorld being the most notable.
The best of those 3 being
WizardWorld had an ironic downside, by the end of the year of production time we put into it, the platform for which we had created it (
The Tapwave Zodiac handheld) was cancelled by its manufacturer due to poor sales and competition in the market from the Sony PSP and Nintento DS. So the market for that game was swept out from underneath our feet.
Enjoying working with these programmers and wanting more I tried for some time to make additional contacts online to create more games as the artist. However in many instances the programmers either wanted free art, or to only offer "royalties" which is code for "free art now, and if I ever make anything I'll give you 10% of the profits".
I decided that this wasn't the way to go and tried get into making entire games myself.
I decided to pursue diving into Valve's Source engine. They have a
robust mod community and market the product as being something you can
go commercial with - in fact something they might even help you with if
you make a good enough project.
To that ends I decided first to make my own "add on" for Team
Fortress 2 -- an entire level with 100% of my own artwork, textures,
level design, signs, props, posters etc.
SPACEBASE! was born a year later
I definitely think SPACEBASE was a success. Firstly I actually finished it! This is a bigger accomplishment than you might imagine. Many (if not 95%) of game projects in the hobbyist / indie community never get finished. That I was able to fully realize my vision and produce it by myself in a year is really an amazing accomplishment that I remain proud of today.
I had several interesting ventures including a stab at making my own MMO that I called "Throne of Elements" using the
Multiverse engine. (Note the Multiverse link may not work as they have closed down and only plan to keep the website up for several months). I ended my Multiverse activity in 2009 due to their inability to produce an exporter for 3D Studio Max.
I had a wonderful monster ready to go into my test world I had created but there was no way to export him into their game engine
Having been burned a little by a year investment into Multiverse I returned to the Valve Source engine and have been working in part on a project with a working title of "Dungeon Quest"
Dungeon Quest was to be different from SPACEBASE in that it would not be an 'add on' to an existing Valve game but a "total conversion" that is a stand alone game. Despite it being a total conversion it would have to be tied to one of the executables of Valve's existing games unless it actually went commercial. Given some of my design goals I decided the best fit for this was
Left4Dead, and eventually
Left4Dead 2
One decision that spurred this is I could use some of the artwork from my cancelled Throne of Elements MMO to help spur this project forward. And indeed I made fairly quick progress. I started to run into some minor problems ; I needed bits of code or scripts to make the custom game play elements for my game. I became frustrated in this as I was not able to find someone to help me with this.
So I put this project on a "slow burn" sideline. I still work on it here and there, but not with any urgency as I do have a major roadblock - no scripting or code support available to get it done!
Not too long later (middle of 2010) I did run into another programmer who was working on a game and wanted me to do the artwork for him.
He asked me to do a mock up of the main game play screen to see how my work was compared to the work he had done himself.
He was absolutely excited about the work and really enthusiastic about it. He asked me to add a few things, and tweak things here and there. I was excited myself thinking that finally I had another opportunity at working with a programmer as an artist and shipping another game.
Having finished the game board I gave him 2 weeks to work with it and then brought up the prospect of moving forward on finishing the rest of the game. Part of that discussion naturally had to do with the financials.
At this point he lost interest in working with me and eventually told me he would stick with his old (and I'll just be honest: crappy) art.
At that point .. well something in me snapped in frustration. I've been at the mercy of finding programmers to work with and its been either very difficult to do, or the ones you do find are not willing to involve you financially. There's no reason on earth for an artist with 15+ years of experience to create you beautiful art if there is not going to be some payback for them. This frustration comes from many different interactions and dozens of projects that never saw the light of day - and therefore aren't worth mentioning here. But there was definitely a many-year repeating pattern that eventually I just could not let be my last remaining hurdle to being a game designer.
And so this announcement. I decided to go ahead and learn to program myself. My first game will be a fairly simple project in the interest of being able to actually complete it.
I researched a lot of different options and eventually decided to go with
The Game Creators Dark Basic Professional during 2011 and began teaching myself to program.
Shortly thereafter I got a bit sidetracked into some modelling projects that I decided to go with because they could contribute to my Dungeon Quest project. One of the items I created in that venture was this Salamander model.
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| Salamander 3D Model |
This was a lot of fun and a nice diversion but now in 2012 I am back on track with programming again and have an early alpha of my game already running.
I have decided to blog about my experiences of learning to program because I really want to dive into it mentally. The more you think about something the more your head wraps around it
Stay tuned for updates!
