Going deeper into the Underground: the story of one extreme game design

Well waving, the engineer made a powerful punch on top of the monitor. There was a crash and ... the monitor came to life! Then, 30 years ago, when in my ten years I attended evening classes at the school of young programmers at the university, only an engineer had the right to repair monitors in this way. Only he knew in what place and with what force to apply computer equipment, so that it came to life, and we, the children who were lucky to get into the school of programmers, continued, happy, to write our lines of code.

At that time I lived in an industrial area of ​​the city, in a wooden house, lost among factories. The road from home to the university took an hour and a half, and I also had to take time off from school. The fact is that without missing the last lesson, there was no chance to have time for classes at the university. As a rule, it fell out that the last two lessons were labor lessons. I had to conclude an agreement with the Trudovik: in the first lesson of labor, I clean all the cabinets, and then he lets me go from the second.

Freed at school, I quickly wedged into the snow-covered paths between the factories, so that in the twilight of Siberian evenings, in half an hour, walk to the bus stop.
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After hitting for an hour in filled buses and making one transfer, I finally got into another world. It was fantastic. The spacious and dazzlingly bright rooms of the university were filled with magic: computers.

In the first classes, we studied Fortran on Spark-1256 computers. The information in it was displayed on a monochrome character CRT monitor in 16 lines with 64 characters each. The characters had a size of 5 × 7 points.



Programs could be recorded on tape cassettes. However, there was a nuance - it was impossible to record several different programs on one tape, while reading they were all read continuously. For some reason, Spark could not determine the end of one program and the beginning of the next. The schoolchildren were in short supply for us, and the programs wanted to be saved even then, by experience, such a hack was opened: after someone recorded his program, he took out the cassette and cut a vertical strip on a magnetic tape with a nail. It turned out that if you cause significant physical damage to the magnetic layer, in this case, the computer determined the end of the program. One cassette was enough for us to “cut” our small programs for several months. The main thing that was a nail!

Then came the "Corvettes" - computers with two independent video controllers, displaying the image on the screen at the same time. One is alphanumeric, 16 is the term of 64 characters, 8 × 16 dots each. The other is graphic, 512 × 256 pixels with 8 colors. The Corvette was quick!



However, with the preservation of programs here was a nuance. Only one Corvette, a teacher, had a 5¼ inch drive. The remaining 10 computers in the class were connected to it over a local network at a speed of 19.5 kilobits / sec. And this network was not stable!

The classes began with the fact that our programs were downloaded from the drive to the local computers. After several hours of work on our programs, we had to download them back to the teacher’s computer to save, and, in turn, to save them. It was here that sometimes real dramas were played. It was enough to inadvertently move the keyboard, and the transfer of the program could stop, even if the transfer was from another Corvette. Can you imagine the feelings of a child who “sawed” his first “big” program for several hours when he lost all his work during the day? Therefore, the period of preservation of programs, which sometimes took up to an hour or two, was “quarantine”. No one had the right to touch computers. Usually, everyone stood and watched the process with a sinking heart, trying to breathe more quietly.

I made a platform game for the first time on Corvette, and even with co-authors wrote a book on programming with examples of sprites from this game. Circulation was 30 thousand, which is not immediately, but sold.



If “Corvettes” opened for me graphics with several gradations of gray, then later appeared MSX and ZX Spectrum opened the endless world of games with color graphics. Oh, what games were there! Remember? Even now, after 30 years, I sometimes run an emulator to play Zanac Ex, Metal Gear, Vampire Killer (Castlevania). But until now I nostalgically remember the times when the monitors were alphanumeric, and the printers were matrix.

Style

So I found my own style of graphics, in which only a year ago I decided to make a game. All graphics of the game are made using 94 characters, each of which can take on a color from a 256-color palette. These characters are:

!"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~ 

With time and skill, with just these symbols, you can get quite atmospheric graphics.



About a year ago, I decided to carry out a “pen test” - fell out of my life for three months and made a puzzle-platformer game Proto Raider. Working 10 hours a day, including weekends, I made 64 levels in three months. Each level took at least one day. This event knocked down the family budget, but the result was worth it! Despite the minimal retro graphics, the game appealed to my family, my friends, and then many, many people. Resource Touch Arcade called Proto Raider the game of the week.

The graphics of the game is made in the style of ASCII art, which immediately identified a narrow niche. Not many people perceive this style of graphics. Moreover, the ASCII art in the game was not classic. Despite the “ancient” graphics, I wanted the game itself to be modern. Therefore, I deviated from the "canons" of ASCII art. I made the movement of the character, bosses and some other elements smooth. The characters jump to adjacent positions of the text matrix not jerk, but for several frames. And I made a vector plume for the main character, for which I received from the real ASCII artists in full, but the loop turned out to be a cool feature, since well separated the little man from the background and showed the trajectory.



The narrowness of the niche was compensated by interest from the press. To my surprise, the game brought non-zero money. It became clear that it is impossible to do business on such games, but you can earn a little. I tried to formulate this idea in credits that were shown to those who passed all levels.

New game - add story

This summer I began to realize one more thing that I had already wanted to do for several years - to write a science fiction story and make a game on it. The idea of ​​the story has long been formed, but I wanted to make an unusual move: in my Facebook feed I asked if anyone would like to participate in the story. I promised to study a friend’s profile (if I didn’t know him personally) and enter it into the story under this real name.

20 people responded, which is four times higher than the initial number of characters in the story. Now the story has become a 100-page short story and is 80% complete. The story describes the unusual world of the planet Frango, surrounded by the anomaly of the same name, which makes it difficult to access. Nevertheless, the planet was colonized 1,500 years ago, but due to the inaccessibility and mutations caused by the anomaly, the development of society on the planet was not very uniform. The download screen of the new game shows this:



On the one hand, a large proportion of the 500 million population of the planet is quite well developed.



Pilots regularly have to go through an anomaly into outer space to communicate with humanity, as well as to deliver tourists. There is a space flight school where most boys and girls want to go. On the other hand, large groups of people regressed.



In this world, the fate of the pilot Henri is described - the main character of the story and the game, who is called the best human pilot in the Universe. The fact is that the anomaly surrounding the planet, from generation to generation, affects the inhabitants' brains, which leads to mutations that make ideal piloting machines out of the pilots of the planet. The pilots of the planet Frango can fight on equal terms with drones driven by artificial intelligence. This is not to the liking of many hierarchs of artificial super intelligences.

With such a story (Sci-fi), graphic style (ASCII) and game mechanics (logical platformer), the design of the new game will be truly extreme! But personally, I am very inspired and ready to spend hundreds of hours creating an atmosphere with the help of 94 characters.

What happens, you can look at ASCIIDENT . How do you like the name, by the way, does the game fit?

Many relatives and friends ask - why? Why spend so much time and effort on such a game? You can make another, also interesting, and earn 100 times more money.

With age, a man changes only the size of the toys. Game development is my job. And creating a Sci-fi ASCII platformer is my expensive toy. This is the first. And secondly, someone has to put the drones with artificial intelligence in place!



I hope my story about the unusual design of the game was interesting. A lot of technical issues have been omitted, but I’m happy to tell about them in the comments if there are questions.