The return of Player Manager?

Yes, I am working on a new game. This is the sequel to my 1990 game Player Manager that I have been waiting 20 years to do.

Why so long? That’s a topic for another day. What I want to post here is a progress report.

Why now? Because someone whom I gave an introduction to game programming (in an attempt a long time ago to train an apprentice) recently declared that he would be extremely willing to help me work on a new game. He’s David Athay, who now lives and works in the US.

Yes that’s all it took. Someone to say “I’ll help” who could and would actually help… with actual programming. It’s a psychological thing really. Sure I could code it all myself, but… I don’t want to. It’s a lonely road… and I am sick and tired of wrestling with APIs… I want to make games.

Games that I can sell. For actual money. In a world where most of the audience want everything for free, and would be quick to point out “there’s more to life than money”. Money is life. Without it I die of starvation and exposure. I would be quite happy if I could earn enough to live on. iPhone may provide some glimmer of hope there. Maybe.

Of course, both of us are doing this in our spare time. There is no funding, or salaries. The project at this stage is only a few weeks old.

David is working on iPhone primarily, since the current idea is an iPhone product, and like I said I want to actually spend my time working on a game, not learning Objective-C.

I am, however, building the game on OS X, because it is a lot easier to develop on a computer platform rather than messing about with the iPhone development kit. In order to achieve this, I am using the Allegro library which serves my purposes well. I have a representation of the game running natively on OS X.

David maintains the iPhone version, and does the appropriate integration to make sure that everything I do on OS X ports to the iPhone.

This is not as difficult as it sounds, because I have developed an architecture that hides the game code from the platform. So in theory, a simple recompile for iPhone is all that is required to keep the games in sync.

What have I done so far? Well I dug out the old graphics for the Megadrive game Dino Dini’s Soccer (a.k.a GOAL! on Amiga and ST). I recreated a pitch map out of the tile set. I gave these to David who quickly implemented them on iPhone.

I have set up my own custom IDE around the Emacs editor and ported my CoreLib library (with vector classes, debugging functions and string classes and so on) from MSVC to GCC.

I have ported and extended my Property Tree system (more on that in a future post) so that I can make appropriate parts of the game data driven.

I have ported my PROC system (this is a software threading/hierarchical finite state machine/event driven system for managing complex behaviors… it actually allows one to write scripts directly in C++… again maybe more on that at a later date).

I have created various classes to abstract away platform specific details.

Right now, I have a scrolling pitch with some sprites… and am about to add the sprite animation system.

The game is going to be 2D for a few reasons. First of all, 3D is simply not as good as 2D for this kind of game. Secondly, I am using existing 2D graphics so that I don’t have to find an artist (at least for a while). Finally, I want to focus on gameplay as quickly as possible. This is going to be an iPhone game after all, I am not trying to compete with FIFA or PES in terms of graphics. I want to get going with creating the gameplay and tuning it, because that is what I love to do when I make a game: I focus on the gameplay above all else. It has worked for me in the past too: The graphics on KICK OFF were appalling. Yet it beat off all other games in the UK to win the Industry Dinner award for “Best 16 bit product” in 1989. Yes, it even beat Populous. Perhaps there is a lesson there.

Back then, the computer systems were heavily constrained: 8Mhz 68000 processors and 128K of ram. I wrote everything in assembler out of necessity, and hand optimised critical areas of code in order to keep the game running at 50 FPS.

Things are very different now, not only in terms of computer hardware, but also in terms of my skills. For the past 10 years I have worked on getting the best out of the C++ programming language, and I feel I have reached the point where I have figured out how to get the most out of it: it actually turns out to be a fairly limited set of patterns and design heuristics that enable me to do 90% of everything I need. So, especially since computer hardware is so much faster now, I am using a proper architecture which will hopefully allow me to develop the game quickly, while of course making it easy to port to other platforms. Flexibility is a key part of my strategy.

I am also, for the first time since 1995, working in a completely Microsoft free development environment. Just saying that makes me feel good. Kickoff, Kickoff2 and Player Manager were developed on the ST (cross assembled for Amiga). GOAL! and Dino Dini’s Soccer were developed on a 486 Dell Unix box. This was Unix before Linux came along. I loved that Unix environment: so powerful, so robust. This is back in 1991: it had a 1024×768 display, 300MB hard disk and… I think 8MB of RAM. You don’t want to know how much it cost. But it was worth it; it paid for itself easily.

However, since about 1996 I have lived with the hell known as Microsoft. Although I always had a unix box handy, they have always been used as servers. Problems with hardware compatibility, the necessity of PC development and so on meant that I was stuck with Mr. Gate’s efforts. These past 14 years of servitude to Mr. Gate’s empire have not been fun. And I have had enough.

But a great thing happened: Apple adopted Unix in OSX. Unfortunately I did not pay much attention until (spurred on by the idea of iPhone development) I got my first Mac last year. Sick and tired of how my PCs would keep going wrong and seem to slow to a crawl and take 10 minutes to reboot … I tried to use the Mac, more to get out of the rut than anything. Now… I consider it my primary machine. Yes, it is what I always wanted: an all round usable versatile computer with lots of commercial software and hardware which runs UNIX. I ain’t going back now… except of course when I have to (for example when teaching).

No doubt this will have many of my students (and some colleagues) shaking their heads. Hey, but that is normal. I’m used to it. At least there’s a context to it now, perhaps. I love UNIX. So I love my Mac.

Anyway, I digress.

I am making a public statement that I am developing a new game, in part to make sure I actually do it. But I have no idea how long it will take at this time. It’s early days. About 21 or so in fact. Stay tuned for more…