PixlBit

I've been playing video games since 1981. And only a little less time after I started playing video games, I learned I could alter the way my games played, whether it was from tinkering with the game's programming or by using tools provided in the game itself for user-made content. I also learned how to make my own computer games, in a rudimentary fashion.

BASIC

Almost every home computer system released until about Windows 95 came with a version of BASIC hard-wired into the system. BASIC is a programming language that allows the user to give to the computer instructions using numbered lines of programming and basic English language commands. BASIC is just that, basic. It was a language designed to make computers a little less intimidating to the general public of the time, and as a training language for those new to computer programming. It's not powerful, and is mostly suited to text adventures and games with very simple tile-based graphics. And that's what I made using BASIC: a series of text adventures.

These games usually sported nonsensical plots, such as escaping from an alien abduction on a distant planet, a caveman hunting treasures that would be out of place in prehistoric times. There was also a game I made, based in Greek mythology with which I was enamoured at the time, where you were a mortal killed by Ares, the god of war. You had to escape from the underworld by bribing both Cerberus and Charon (lifted from the myth of Psyche and Eros), answer the riddle of the Sphinx, and obtain a weapon crafted by Sisyphus, who mocked the Olympians. Needless to say, David Jaffe executed that concept on the PS2 far better than I did on my old Atari. I don't think these games ever made it beyond my own personal floppy disks, though I did think of uploading them to bulletin board systems at the time. But back then, going online was a luxury. You either had to call another person's computer bulletin board system (BBS) over plain old telephone landlines (which I will get to presently) or pay CompuServe $30 an hour to access their online services.

Back then, my mother used to get computer magazines, and a common feature of those was program schematics for BASIC programs. You typed the program lines in, typed in the "RUN" command, and you were home eating bear and potatoes. Or something. The programmers would even encourage the reader to customize the games and play with the programming.

Later on, I dabbled a bit in more sophisticated languages like Pascal and C, but by that point, life was getting in the way. Maybe I should have stuck with learning C, who knows?

Built-in Modding

There were also a lot of the games in the 1980s where the programmers offered built in tools to customize your gaming experience. The most famous example from this time is the track editor mode in the NES classic Excitebike, where kids like me made courses loaded with ramp jumps from end to end trying to make the course as flashy and stupid-hard as possible. The idea was to get your player character killed in a spectacular and hilarious fashion. I had a couple of other games at this time that had built in level editors. Mr. Robot and his Robot Factory was a platforming game similar to games like Donkey Kong and Miner 2049er, where you could build your own levels and add enemies, power-ups, elevators, conveyor belts, and warp pads as you saw fit. There was also Adventure Creator, where you could make your own overhead-view 20-room dungeon with enemies, traps, and treasures. I created my own "sequel" to Zelda and Zelda II on this game, which was a bizarre mishmash of several of my favorite arcade and console titles, like Zelda, Metroid, and of all games, Mappy (probably because it was one of the few games I could think of back then that had cats in it). "LInk"'s arch-nemesis in this adventure was Lucifer from Ghost 'n' Goblins!

I get published (sort of)

In 1993, my dad got me a modem, and I entered the exciting world of BBS's. These BBS's were online sites, not connected to any kind of centralized network other than Ma Bell's phone lines, run by private operators using separate phone lines (because otherwise the owner wouldn't be able to receive voice calls). You had to dial up the phone number of the BBS you wanted to call on your computer through the terminal program (the early predecessor to the modern web browser), and if you managed to connect and didn't get a busy signal, you could go onto a BBS, post on local and FidoNet forums, download shareware games (the original Doom got its start as a shareware game in this manner), and play online games against other callers.

One such game was called Land of Devastation, written by a guy who was then a student at the University of Arizona. This game was a post-apocalyptic RPG inspired by games like Wasteland. The author kindly provided end users with the Pascal source code as well as an in-game modding utility so that users could personalize the game and run it on their BBSs. I managed to make quite a few decent modifications to the game, which included new maps, weapons, armor, enemies, and even environmental effects. I uploaded my mods onto BBS's, and since i was friends with the SysOps, they'd install them. So many BBS's in the Oklahoma City area were running my LOD mod, and people were playing them! That was pretty cool. That came to an end in 1997, which is when people started getting on the World Wide Web en masse and most SysOps closed their BBS's since nobody was calling anymore. :(

Surprisingly, however, I did not really get into the big modding scene of the early-mid 90s: the Doom modding scene. Part of this was that although I would play Doom from time to time, I have never been a big fan of FPS's other than outliers like Metroid Prime or the Bethesda Fallout series. So I never made any Doom .WADs. I did play some interesting ones, such as a really good re-creation of Stauf's mansion from The 7th Guest and a couple of Mario-themed mods, but never made my own. :)

One of my favorite games of last year was Super Mario Maker, which does a really good job of allowing users to create and share their own Mario levels. But though I've made a few levels, some of the more popular levels are leagues beyond anything I've ever done with SMM.

RPG Maker

When I turned 19, Final Fantasy VII came out, and at that point, I'd have given an arm, a leg, and various other body parts/organs to work for Squaresoft. It was my dearest ambition to be able to make a big, splashy RPG masterpiece like that. I guess I'd still like to do that, but I've come to accept that the economics of such a project in this day and age are largely unfeasible.

That said, in 2000, Agetec released the first RPG Maker on the PlayStation as an answer to my fever-dreams of being the next Hironobu Sakaguchi or Yuji Hori, or a way to play let's make-believe on those dreams, LOL. I invested a fair amount of time into it, though I never made much more than a castle scene and a forest.  What was always interesting to me was that there was apparently a licensing agreement by which you could sell games made using RPG Maker - on PS1 - as long as you acknowledged the use of RPG Maker. How were you supposed to go about that? Sell them on memory cards?

RPG Maker is designed to make a very specific type of game: the turn-based RPG. It's certainly not as versatile as engines like Unreal or Unity, and it doesn't support 3-D modelling as far as I can see. I might never make my own Final Fantasy VII, but I might at least manage my own Quest 64, Vay, or The 7th Saga, maybe?

These, I'm dabbling in RPG Maker MV, the latest release of the engine. This one has a side-view battle system built in, like the 8- and 16-bit Final Fantasy games, rather than the Dragon Quest/Wizardry-style front view battle system. I'd like to get some kind of game together and maybe put it up on Steam Greenlight with all the other cheeseball homemade games.

But in order to do that, I'd have to quit playing all these commercial RPG releases I play, and buckle down in my spare time. So I chip away at it a piece at a time. Currently, I'm working on a world map and a town map inspired by the area I grew up in in early childhood, Pinal County, Arizona, and more specifically, the town of Maricopa as it appeared circa 1982-1983. I haven't decided whether to make the game a vignette of an event that I remember from my childhood, something totally fantastic using the setting. It will probably be a little of both. If I can ever get anything seriously off the ground, I'll probably post pics at some point.

Anyway, thanks for reading about the muddled musings of a frustrated wannabe game designer. Until next time, kiddies...