The Sea Cow Games Blog

First, welcome. Second, don’t expect to see too much going on here. Mostly, this blog is to inform my fans of what is going on with Sea Cow Games. Who are we? For that, we must put our time traveling beanies on, and go back to 1976.

1976. The year I was not born in, but it held a Christmas in which my parents got a Telstar video game system. http://www.thegameconsole.com/ That system was fun to play! Pong, Hockey, Tennis, Handball and Jai Alai, all in their black and white blocky glory. Whoever made it to 10 first won.

During the next few years, a hand held football game came out and sparked my curiosity about electronic games. http://www.handheldmuseum.com/Coleco/EQB.htm Other LED games also arrived, like baseball, and car racing games. Then, LED games gave way to LCD games, such as Tiato’s Mummy’s tomb (which was solar powered, going green in the 70’s!) and of course the Nintendo Game & Watch series. http://www.gameandwatch.com/ Of which, I had Snoopy Tennis, RainShower, and Exterminator (Vermin). These games were very social. If anyone saw you playing it, it was so simple to just hand them the game and in 5 seconds show them how to play. The trick was getting the game back from them!

Trips to Adventureland on Long Island allowed me to see the transition of pinball machine games to video games. The much maligned DeathRace was a popular hit. But to find the one truly influential arcade experience, we must again travel back in time to my family going out to dinner at The Ground Round.

Rumors of peanut shells being thrown to the ground, cartoons projected on a wall, and a bunch of video games really whetted my appetite. Well, upon arrival at the restaurant, I could see it was going to be a long night as the arcade was packed with kids 5 deep. I was also disappointed at the lack of peanuts to shuck and litter the floor with…each table had a small bowl of popcorn, and my parents wouldn’t allow me to throw good food on the floor. The cartoons were of the Terrytoon variety Deputy Dawg The doldrums set in with the lousy food and a trip to the bathroom where I found a giant cockroach in a urinal…alive.

Dinner had been finished. At last, we got to fight the mob near the arcade! This wasn’t the normal fuss around Asteroids, or other clone games we could play at a friend’s house who was lucky enough to have an Atari 2600’s. This was Pac-man! The colors, the dots, the friggin red ghost Blinky. The cut scenes were incredibly simple and direct. It made Telstar feel archaic when we got home.

Leap forward to 1981. Classmates, neighbors, and friends are jumping onto the Atari 2600 bandwagon more and more. Christmas after Christmas would pass without so much as a hint of getting one. I began to loathe the system and any kid who would brag about how great it was to play Breakout at home. Until, one fateful winter day, my brothers and I found a Bally Game system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bally_Astrocade in a Montgomery Wards somewhere in upstate NY around Christmas time. I think it was the superior graphics and fact that it kept us quiet in the store for hours on end that our parents finally broke down and bought the system with tons of games. Kids in school had no idea what games I was talking about when we returned from Christmas break, and were probably disappointed when they would come over to play a game, and not be able to borrow and use any on their system.

My dad bought a cartridge that would allow you to program the system. We would spend hours taking turns programming Bally Basic on a numeric keypad with a color overlay

The book that came with the Basic cartridge had such programs as “Display 256 colors at once!” and “Artillery Duel”. We already had a cartridge of “Artillery Duel”, but it was all the more fun and frustrating to laboriously enter the code in only to not have it work after 8 hours of coding it in.  Bally Basic book.

It was a winter evening. Maybe it was spring. Who knows? My brothers and I spent the whole day coding. After dinner, my older brother exclaimed “Johnny says he wants to write games when he grows up!” I don’t recall appreciating the dinner table spotlight being thrust upon me, but I do recall my dad replying with “Oh, Johnny. You don’t even know how to write a For loop!” (He was right…I didn’t!)

But my dad must have saw my determination. The Bally was quickly followed by a Commodore Vic 20, then a Commodore 64. Computer magazines like Compute! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMPUTE! quenched my thirst to boldly copy games out of the magazines verbatim. How imaginative! My younger brother would modify the text in the games to make them funnier, actually. Live and learn.

It was around 1984 that I realized the manuals that came with the 64, coupled with the magazines, coupled with the sample game code would allow one with enough curiosity coupled with excessive teenage free time coupled with naivety and stupidity to make a game. I quickly learned how to make sprites adding binary values.

This, much like the Bally, was way too labor intensive. I set out to make a stick figure ninja, like the one in the Bruce Lee game at that time, only to have the upper part of the ninja come out ok, but my math was off because the body sheared in two, with extra appendages. Futility rekindled! Argh!

Zork III passed the time brooding over the problem at hand. Then, one summer. Must have been the summer of 1985. Let me Google. Yep. Summer of 85. This author had the same experience as I. Read on! http://www.mts.net/~kbagnall/commodore/gamemaker/info.html

Garry Kitchen’s Game Maker solved all the problems! Well, most of them. Technically, it was superior to any game I could create with Basic. It had a sprite editor, sound editor, music editor, IDE using some type of pseudo Basic, and it would even tell you how much memory you had left! Many games were half finished during that summer. I recall making a Duck Hunt style game before Duck Hunt even came out. I take that back. Google says Duck Hunt came out for the arcades in 1984, so I may have been influenced. But my version had a hunter complete with a walk cycle. I also made a game modeled after Top Cat, the cartoon. As Top Cat, you would walk around the fence seen in the opening credits as fish bones fell from the sky. Every now and then, Officer Dibble would peek out from behind the fence, knocking you down, and bottles thrown from the side would kill you. It had a title screen and everything. Man, I wish I kept that.

I then created a WW2 bomber game, where I tried to emulate 3D by drawing buildings seen from overhead in different perspective. Then I ported a hand held tank game where you had a tank you had to drive over a bridge while bombs dropped from above. For Christmas, I created a Ziggy animation that ran about 10-15 minutes.

When summer ended, typing class came along in the school year 1985. I was disappointed when we used old school typing machines that left you with Hulk hands. Hulk Smash C64 Return Key! However, good old NY school districts didn’t skimp out on computer classes for juniors and seniors. My junior year I took BASIC, then PASCAL in my senior year. I was quickly learning programming, and slowly realizing that game creation was only a small subset of what computers could do.

Sadly, I started losing the spark to create games in college. The SNES just beat it into me that game design and game programming are two different endeavors. Computer Science classes at NYIT only further drove the point home. Not a single class even mentioned video games, and once, when a professor of a Computers and Assembly Level 2 class went around asking what it was we wanted to do with computers, I stunned the class when I said I wanted to make games. I could see a dim light come into many of my classmates eyes, as they probably recalled the wonder and mystery of the glowing arcade that lured them in, only now to flutter around Turbo Pascal with dreams of writing business software like so many battered moths around a porch light. But not me! I stoked the dream, even if I saw it fading with every derivative Calculus threw at me.

With the passing of a dear Uncle, and becoming the recipient of a mistaken $2,000 US Treasury Bond that was supposed to go to my brother upon his demise, I bought my first computer. And yes, I repaid my brother! It was an Intel 386, 25 Mhz with 4 MB of RAM, 1MB on the video card, and a 15 inch Viewsonic monitor. No modem. No sound card.

I got my degree, major and minor in Computer Science. I should have gotten my Master’s, but was too eager to start making the big bucks in writing software with C++…ready to work anywhere in the greater tri-state area. I started out at a start up real estate company that was trying to tie in the yet unknown internet with MLS sales. I was the software guy who wrote the app using Borland’s Paradox. Borland was king before Microsoft. King I tells ya!

I was making $100 a week. Yes, this was in the year 1993, and no zeros have been left off. One hundred clams a day. I was very naive and believed the story my boss was telling me how I would be rich someday. Luckily, my Dad must have been combing the want ads on a daily basis, as I came home beat from work on a summer evening, and he told me about a local game company that was looking for a programmer.

I went into Lake Success for the interview, only to be greeted at the door by a barking Spike, the owner’s shar pei. Rene Vidmir, the director of Deadly Games, http://www.deadlygames.com quieted Spike down. During the interview Rene demonstrated the Mac version of M4, a hypercard WWII game he wrote. At the end of the interview, he didn’t believe I had the skills to port the game to Windows. But he liked me, and gave me The Battle of Britain to port.

And so, for the next year, I learned Windows programming, and how to override every Windows standard to get a Hypercard App interface. I don’t think the game sold well at all. Had I written it to behave as a Windows App should, I think Deadly Games would still have something to sell. But what a time it was to be working there! A beach house. 11am starting times. Breakfast a the local diner. Delis within walking distance. Rene and his girlfriend Karen would go to the Caribbean to sail for weeks at a stretch, leaving me to answer the phones and look after the shop. It was great! And like all things good, it was not meant to last. I was drawing a salary based on royalties, and the commute was too much for my old jalopy cars. Once I bought a decent car, I needed a decent paycheck. I left Deadly Games, and my only real paying gaming gig, in the middle of porting over Bomber. It was a bittersweet moment. WinG, the precursor to Direct X, had just come out, and Doom had shown the world that the PC was a viable platform for cutting edge gaming.

Working in the real world didn’t completely tear me away from game making. Over the years, I taught myself 3D Studio Max, and with DirectX becoming the staple to PC gaming, I created Offshore Sailing. Offshore Sailing taught me that niche games can be successful, but they still have to be the best game in that niche. My game wasn’t the best. The demo has been downloaded over 250,000 times, but the game barely sold 200 copies. Enough to buy a new machine, but hardly enough to work on my next game fulll time.

Thus ends our trip down memory lane, or was it via time machine? Whichever. Take off your time travelling beanies, you look foolish! We are back in the present. 2008. Sony’s PS3 has the same user interface as the Bally machine. So much for progress, eh?

This blog will mostly be about the creation of our next game. Glitchy The Dolphin. http://www.glitchythedolphin.com It’s about a dolphin that glitches. That’s all you need to know about for now. Stay tuned and thanks for reading!