The Idea Oubliette

I started programming when I was young, with the hopes of writing video games. I think a lot of kids start that way. When you like something, or someone, you try to emulate what you’re seeing. But how has that early dream turned out? They tell writers to write what they know. It’s good advice. How can you write about life in the Serengeti without have someone to give you a first hand account or having been there yourself? You can always use your imagination, and that’s all you can really do when writing fantasy or science fiction. It works for writing video games. How can you expect to write a genre you don’t immerse yourself in? These days I spend most of my gaming time playing casual games. I’m busy doing other things, and don’t want to spend long stretches just sitting at the console or computer. Recently I read an article about the kind of video games the most people tend to flock to. Typically they’re games that are relatively simple and involve sorting things in some way. It...

Almost entirely throughout my life, I’ve had access to computers. In most of that time I’ve wanted to write computer games. Most of my attempts have been aborted early on, before even getting code written. Stacks and stacks of paper have been used to sketch characters and scenery. One day in 2001 I decided to put together a small Space Invaders-like game named SpaceRat . SpaceRat began as a set of graphics I had created for a friend’s clone of Space Invaders. I had drawn a “hero” space ship and some enemy ships. There were a number of enemy sprites that I did not use in SpaceRat, simple because they did not fit the look I was going for. Starting off with pre-made graphics gave me the push I needed and gave me the opportunity to jump straight into programming the game. I was still in university, but was then employed in a co-operative education placement for discreet, a division of AutoDesk . Health problems prevented me from actually working at the time, and so to judge my ability ...