Development Difficulties and History - part 1 or 2

I decided to create an educational game a year ago, and my current progress on the Learn and Play game for learning English is a semi-functional piece of software written in BlitzMax with only 4 games, an even less functional and older version in Blitz3D and lastly an even older and less functional version written in Game Maker. So a year has passed an I'm not feeling too optimistic.

I will tell you the history of how I came to this point.

My first experience into game making was when I was 10 or 11 in 1995 and 1996 where I bought a disk version of Klick & Play, which was and is a hilarious graphical programming for making games. I never actually finished a game but some of my highlights included:

• Military Bananas 1,2,3,4,5 and 6! - This was a one screen take on Worms with small bananas with various strange faces and guns. The enemies didn't actually move, but only shot when the user's character (I forget the name and story I made up for him) was on the same level as him
• Bebo - an awful platformer of a baby in a blue mac and bobble hat who said "eh-oh Bebo" in my recorded voice when he died.
• Various racing games - I often tried to make Formula One games, but these often looked like small cars going round a track made of Lego bricks.

However, I don't think I still have the floppy disks that contain these games, which is a sad loss for me, and even if I did I don't actually have a floppy-disk drive. But, I will try to recreate some images of the graphics or characters and post them in a future blog post even if it's just for personal sentimental value.


After just a couple of years with Klick and Play, I got bored with the limitations of the software and my inability to draw, and also the installation for the first time of the internet in my house diverted my attentions, as now I wanted to make websites,

After a few years of making websites of various quality through my teens, my next brush with game making came in my final year of University. After, two years of struggling and failing to learn the Java programming language for anything except command line programs, I was faced with the task of creating a program for my final year project, how I dreaded this.

While other people wear making complex programs for mobile phones and all sorts, I some how managed to get a project to make a train system simulation, for mostly simulating the signal boxes and a train moving through it. But let's just say my final program was incredibly less complex than my original discussions, but somehow I managed to get a 2(II) instead of the fail or 3rd I had expected.


To be continued...