I’m still going through my 8bit gaming phase. Its made me think. All the new mobile phone games that are appearing today, maybe some of the developers for these should go through an 8bit renaissance too, there are a ton of excellent games that came out of that time. Some forgotten, some not. Some changed the way we thought of games forever onwards. Some where so rubbish they should have taken the developers out and slapped them until they pleaded forgiveness.
These games are just addictive, the graphics on some are simplistic, on some you wonder how they managed to make a game so beautiful with so little memory and only a few pixels and colours available. Simply amazing.
I was never a console guy. I always preferred my computer games to be hack-able, to be able to write my own when I wanted, to play with the code, probably the reason I became a developer myself. I was never up to scratch on graphics and stuff, not my scene, but I see code when I think of it. I can’t explain how it works, but if I decided to write some assembly language I can see the structure in my head. I can type it up and it works first time, I may end up breaking it apart, re-structuring it, but like the extreme programming guys, I like to get that initial code out of my system on up and running and working, even if its not the most beautifully written code in the world.
So my process is simple, I think about how the code should work, I see the vision of the code in my head, I type it up, I move it around, I dry run it in my head, then I begin the debugging process. Then once it is working as I expected, I throw it away and write it again, the way it should have been written, I even draw UML diagrams or flow charts and plan our the code, seeing if there are any optimisations that can be made to make it faster etc. In a High level language I don’t bother much with optimisation as that’s the compilers job although I have looked at the output assembly language to laugh at the way the compiler does these things.
So now you know how I code. I’m hoping to start putting up code and sketches and stuff on the developer blog. Will post more game related stuff here. I’m feeling inspired by all these old games, and old code and drawings I’ve found from my old days. I’ll try and post some of these, but at the moment this is difficult as my scanner isn’t working, and I cannot afford to replace it, as I earn £0 at the moment.
Back to my gaming or as I prefer to call it research into the past, lol.
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