November 1999
- Downloaded the Bryce 4 demo from MetaCreations. Bryce is a brilliant 3D rendering package. Here's my first effort - would you believe it took less than 5 minutes to create? Decided to buy Bryce. There is an unbelievably helpful group of people at the Bryce Forum.
- Discovered and fell in love with AGE. AGE is an acronym for "Adventure Game Engine". AGE makes it unbelievably easy to create an adventure with graphics, movies and sound. Brendan's Sample Game is nearly 11M but well worth a look. AGE is ready to use and very robust and requires little or no programming skills. The hobbyist evaluation version is free.
- Discovered GamesBasic. Unlike AGE, GamesBasic is a very new venture with a long way to go. It will be of great interest to Basic programmers who want an easy path to DirectX functionality. The best news is that it is completely free.
- Another possibility is programming in Visual Basic now that Microsoft have released a DirectX library for VB programmers.
- Dec 14: Bryce arrives and I work through the first tutorial in the manual.
- Dec 25 (Yes! Christmas Day!) - my first original piece.
- Dec 26: the fun continues! - I successfully construct a kaleidoscope that works! And I construct my first Bryce object - a streetlight.
- Dec 28: made a "Kaleidoscope Movie" by rotating the pattern. Learnt heaps about animation! Sadly the movie is too large to store here :o(
- Jan 2: have spent lots of time reading the Bryce Talk Logs.
Today, I finally created something myself. Real "small step for man" stuff - a set of arrows for my 1st AGE game based on an arrow in Wingdings 3. - Jan 3: Purchased
Cool Edit 2000 to allow sound recording and editing.
Completed my first puzzle for my Adventure Game. Buttons brought to you by Bryce and the letter "O". - Jan 20: Completed my second puzzle. Boy! Is this slow work!
- Jan 28:
Completed my third puzzle.
Sad news is that I have now exhausted the resources available in the free version of AGE.
I'm currently checking out two other engines: "3D GameStudio A4" and "Arcade 2D GDK".
- Feb 5: The hiatus is because I'm in love again - this time with Dark Basic. I'll try and get back soon to record my progress.
- Feb 17: The news is nearly all good with Dark Basic. Most of my adventure has been recreated using it but, best of all, I've been able to design and implement a far more sophisticated puzzle.
- Mar 26: Well, I've now purchased Dark Basic and I'm so enchanted by it that I'm putting all my energy into my adventure game. I can tell you it's coming along very nicely - so well in fact that I won't be adding any entries here for quite a while.