Oolite Bulletins

Griff wrote:

woah, that sounds amazing! proper programming! I never got any further than typing out 'game listings' from the magazines (and you usually had to buy the next months issue to get the corrections to the mis-prints). There was some cool stuff, an early Jeff Minter game called Rox64 i think, and one of his where you had a load of his 'ancipital' goatman characters running along on conveyor belts that you had to adjust so they all 'ran on the spot' sort of. Hours of fun!
Did you get any 8-bit era games published Tricky or is it strictly demo scene coding you're in to?

My best mate and I co-wrote a Uridium style game minus music and sound as we didn't know how to program the SID chip. We actually sent it off to various software houses but got rejected because of the lack of sound. I did all the graphics and my mate did all the code with a little help from me. We also did a game that was little like Knucklebusters, although that was only half finished. That one had a static background with scrolling platform on top, also the bullets were done with characters. I designed the main character on the one in Strykers Run from the BBC/Electron.

All the sprite animations were done on graph paper first and then transfered into an editor designed for sprites, characters and blockmaps. I think I actually wrote that editor, it was based on one called 3-in-1 editor which you could type in from code in Zzap-64. My memory is hazy on that one though.

We also did some demos that weren't uploaded to BBS's, just for us and our friends. It also taught us coding techniques.

Oddly enough, somewhere, I have an interview with Andrew Braybrook - programmer of the wonderful Paradroid, Uridium and AlleyKat - where he states he programmed all of his games without sound to start with and once they were playable and addictive then he'd add sound out of whatever bytes he had spare...