Whoah, nice background story of you all, it was very interesting to read ^_^ (including the DB-eating-fish and the bad bad bad Cattleruster who got out of Spanish class! *beats with a stick*
).
Whaaaaaaaat can I say... I started playing Final Fantasy on the NES when I was like 5, since I'm a native Spanish-speaker person that helped me to learn English (yeah, I did learn English with FF ¬¬), dad back in that time (1989-1993, around those years) had a 80286 Acer-brand, amber monitor (but the case was cool! xD) and it only had DOS... only games there were Grand Prix (or something like that... it was the closest thing to "3D" that you could get o_o; ).
When I was like, 10, I got my first PC by Santa (that guy... he hasn't given me any gift since I became twelve!
xD) similar to
this one, but it was an Epson Abacus, similar to that one but with a "normal" CRT monitor like we know them nowadays, just black and green... no games, just word processing, drawing program (no mouse, either), spreadsheet, and just that... oh, no hard disks, well... it served its purpose of "computer" back in that time, where I only used it for school work back in primary school xD. It lacked games and I wanted them
The story can go on and on, but to make it short, I got a 386 afterwards, with Win 3.1 and a 600Mb HD when I was like 12 (I used to play Another World (
), then I changed it for a 486/DX2 with Win 95 and later by a Pentium I 133Mhz. In the 486/DX2 I remember I had some "3D" games that were nice to play, such as DOOM, Quake (
), Normality, Monkey Island, Raptor, Slipstream 5000, Fatal Racing (AKA Whiplash), etc. It was fun to play them, but I wanted to learn something better.
With the Pentium I, dad taught me QuickBASIC 5.0, but it wasn't enough for what I wanted to do, I could only make some "title screens" and didn't understand what a FOR loop was xD. I discovered VB 3.0 by dad and made some small "program tries" with it. Nothing released anyways, just playing around. So I left it and stayed in the Playstation for some months.
When I got my Pentium II 300Mhz... that gave me a high jump in the programming scene...
I remember my parents bought some gaming magazines some weeks ago and I was bored staring at the screen... my mom calls me and gives me a spanish book titled "How to create your own videogames"... that was like a shining light that came from above - it was the KEY for making my own games!!!
- the magazine also had a DIV Games Studio 2 demo, complete and it was just a 30-day trial (Of course, consistent reinstalls of the program helped me learn TONS since that just reset the trial time).
Making "games" with DIV2 I learned a bunch, like 2D art, video modes, loops, OOP, sound making, etc. I made some games... "Alex" was a 3rd-person action shooter, "Eternal Wars" was something like a X-Wing simulator, and a "Star somethingIcantRemember" which was the "best" game I made there, plain 2D shoot'em up which had a sequel too, with MAX-made FLC videos and rendered 3D graphics ^_^;. Later I found a 3D library by a guy named Antzrhere and his Mode A 3D library for DIV... that opened the doors to real 3D programming as I could use MDL files (the ones that QUAKE used), handle 3D coordinates, matrixes, etc... pretty awesome if you ask me.
(If you've read up to this point, I guess you deserve something
so later I'm gonna find those old games and post screenshots of my old games and WIPs xD)
While learning DIV 2 I discovered DarkBASIC by a DIVNET online magazine that a DIVManía Spanish magazine had in its CD. I remember I downloaded a DBC demo
when the DB site had a BLUE design and it wasn't even labeled "The Game Creators" or anything related
. I was in awe watching the scorpion demo run flawlessly in dad's computer. Then I got a SiS 6326 8Mb AGP video card installed in my 300Mhz and that was just the boom: Learning DBC.
I left DBC because I couldn't make anything "worthy" in there, and stayed playing PSX for some other months. Then I got into VB 6.0 and made some apps for a company (I was like 14-15) and then into PureBASIC when I became 16.
For the record, the Alienware DBPro trial ran nicely in my 300Mhz/8Mb SiS 6326 and there are also some screenshots (I *think*) if you search for a thread of mine back in that time when the Alienware competition was still around. Sadly the game wasn't finished, but it was fun to work in it.
I just got into DBPro about a year ago (I'm 18 today and from now on until next year xD) but I haven't been "actively" programming in it right now. Since I'm working on a big, big game which I'm planning to do alone (similar to Soul Reaver) all I've been doing now is just 3D modeling, texturing, animating, etc...
And it's just that... but what really got me into game making was that small DIV 2 book and what introduced me to DarkBASIC, that DIVNET magazine that came in the DIVManía CDROM, Issue 8 IIRC.
What I'm doing now... just learning C# with .NET, PB, MAX6, PHP, MySQL... hoping to make a living out of it
(If you read up to this point... o.o I must say... big big big THANKS for reading xD... and sorry for writing a novel ^_^;;;; hehe...)
"As sudden as I arrive, as sudden as I leave."
