DESIGNER'S NOTES
Go to part 2 >>
This section will be updated every 2-4 weeks
until the release of Void War. If you are
interested in knowing what to expect out of
Void War, or are simply interested in the mad
mind of a game designer, hopefully this will
be a tiny bit educational or at least
entertaining.
Part 1: I Wanna Be A
Starfighter Pilot!
I
really became "hooked" on videogames when I
was twelve years old. It was 1981, and the
arcades were ruled by the the likes of
Pac-Man, Asteroids, and Defender. I loved them
all, though I was particularly blown away by
3D games like Tail Gunner and Starfire. The
latter had you shooting down ships that looked
more than a little like the TIE Fighters in
Star Wars. Later that year, I heard about a
friend-of-the-family who actually wrote games
like this on computers. It was all magic to
me... how did you even write a program on a
computer? How did you describe what the ships
looked like and how they were supposed to
behave to a machine? Mind you, back then "Home
Computers" were a new idea just catching on,
and the Atari 2600 was *THE* new household
appliance. But for the most part, when you
talked about computers, people still thought
of big machines the size of desks with
whirling reel-to-reel tapes and green-on-black
monitors.
I
wouldn't let go of the idea, though. I wanted
to figure out how to do this! I wanted to make
games like Asteroids, or Starfire, only (of
course) BETTER. I picked up a few books on
computer programming at the local library, but
they were fairly useless. They discussed
operands and three-letter assembly opcodes for
machines that I would never see. But I still
harbored the idea of writing computer games in
my mind, and I even had a vision of a 3D space
combat game that, like Starfire, put you in
the cockpit of a space fighter. My vision was
tainted by the limited graphics of the
machines of the day, so even my imaginary game
had blocky, pixilated graphics.
Ten years later, after I had taught myself how
to program and was going to college for my
Computer Science degree, I discovered the game
Wing Commander. In the pixilated, blocky 3D
graphics I recognized my old game "design!"
Somebody had created the game I'd dreamed
about! Since I was temporarily staying in a
strange town where I hardly knew anyone, and
my fiancée was out-of-state going to school
for three months, I had a LOT of time to play
Wing Commander.
Over the years, I played lots of other space
combat games, loved most of them, but what I
really wanted to do was test my "mad space
combat skillz" against human opponents. When
those games finally arrived, my genre-loving
friends and I discovered the sad truth: Space
combat is BORING. Oh, these games were spiced
up with missions that required you to be
everywhere at once and make keen tactical
decisions. But the physics of space weren't
like the physics of atmospheric flight (I'm
also a flight sim fan). There really wasn't
much more to them than pointing and shooting
at the bad guys. You didn't have to manage
energy, defy gravity, fight inertia, worry
about drag or stall speeds, or anything like
that. They almost all had the physics of a
desk, and tried to make combat more
interesting by giving you "task overload" with
lots of systems to manage and lots of
objectives to complete.
Of
course, they WERE fun, but ultimately I wanted
to play a game where pilot skill in the void
of space counted for something, and where a
single one-on-one dogfight could be as
exciting as a dogfight in your favorite
WWII-era flight sim. This
is where Void War was born. This was a game
that I wanted to play. So I began the design
of what I thought would be a simple,
two-to-four month project.
But that's the subject for another time...
Go to part 2 >>
