I was invited by @web-gnar to start posting in this community so I thought I would introduce myself. It's only polite :)
Like many Gen-X nerds, I grew up wanting to emulate my "bedroom coder" heroes who, for a short but brilliant time, were written up in the newspapers (remember those?) as being the new rockstars.
It didn't happen, of course, but I did grow up to be a programmer and the desire to finish at least one game stuck with me.
First Full Game
While I did release a lot of stuff over the years, most are what I would call "technology demos" or "tutorial examples". I finally sat down and finished a small game in 2021.
That game was a "get your frog across the road" style game for the Commodore PET. For legal reasons, any similarity to existing intellectual property or ideas is purely coincidental.
Why the Commodore PET?
- Constraints are part of the fun and fuel creativity.
- Not having graphics meant I wasn't overwhelmed by the scope, I had to improvise and focus on fun.
- The PET is a pretty "pure" 6502 machine - no extra chips or complexity.
- Broadly speaking, my goal is to work through the entire history of retro computing, from oldest to newest. PET didn't start things, but it was early (1970s) and the first big success for Commodore.
- I had bought a PET replica and wanted to play on it!
TRSE Development
The PETFrog game was built using a tool called TRSE (AKA "Turbo Rascal"), which is a Pascal-like language/IDE/macro-assembler/toolkit.
TRSE is well worth checking out if you are into programming retro games. In building my game I was able to contribute some libraries and feedback, which was also awesome.
A lot of your code in TRSE will be wrapping assembler routines for efficiency and because TRSE is not a games engine like Unity or whatever, it is more akin to if CC65 and Visual Studio Code had a baby.
That first game made me really want to sit down and create more, which you can see the beginnings of on my Itch page. One that I got fairly far with was a horizontally scrolling shoot em up, again for the PET which is sadly lacking in the genre.
While the demos got a lot of approving support from the community, the way I had coded everything got out of hand memory-wise and I really needed to refactor how I did things.
Knowing I had to essentially start over, I went back to the blank screen and changed direction, figuring one of the other ideas would be easier to implement.
That turned into creating a dungeon crawler.
This was also coded in TRSE, with the goal being to eventually release on everything that TRSE could develop for.
Then lots of horrible life stuff happened and everything went on hold while my wife, daughter and I moved back to England.
Current Day
It has been a couple of years but I am back at it.
Rather than use TRSE, I decided to start over using C.
Even though TRSE is amazing, I am much more comfortable in C, having used it since I was a teenager, and I have forgotten a LOT about coding in TRSE.
C also has the advantage of multiple compiler options, meaning I can target everything from a 1970s CP/M computer right up to a present-day M4 Mac, or even a web browser.
That is not to say I am married to using C, I have also had a lot of fun playing with Pygame:
What's Next?
I want to get my Rogue-Like playable for early playtesting. Right now it is possible to play in my browser-based PET emulator on my website, but otherwise it means compiling the binary for your own system, which is not fun for non-coders.
Having people actually play my game is important as it allows me to know if it is intuitive and fun. This came in very handy with PETFrog.