🤙 🤜🏾 ⛱️ Why did I decide to develop games, or a nostalgic trip for zero 🚃 🐋 👨‍🌾

Hello, Habr! Perhaps we should start with the fact that I have been involved in game development for 10 years. And in this post I want to tell you where my hands are growing from - how and why I started to develop games, and at the same time I’ll get into nostalgia with you in the early 2000s, the first Sonya, the era of pirated CDs and Gambling.

Photo from the news about some pirates as a reference to zero

Here I once published posts in which I talked about the nuances of developing my current project - Wasteland Wars, as well as the technical features of its implementation and statistics. In this post I will tell you how I got into gamedev, or rather, in indie. There will be a lot of subjective experience, my personal memories and experiences. Sometimes I will deviate a little from the theme of game dev in order to maintain the integrity of the story and the details described in it. If this also seems interesting to you, then make yourself comfortable.

As I remember now, the first games that I was given to play on my own. I can always repeat the situation when my elder brother plays instead of me, and I look: today it is called "playing on YouTube." And on their own - that is, not from the knees of an older brother, who was told to sit with a back nibble, but in a normal way: with a keyboard and a mechanical ball mouse in his hands, through this immersion in a mysterious virtual world.

Photo: brother and spinogryz

It all started with Freddi Fish , a simple quest for children, which immediately captured the most beautiful (as it seemed to me then) animation - just like in the Little Mermaid cartoons. Then I came to know NFS: Hot Pursuit in 1998.

We should also mention the first PlayStation , which appeared at our place around the same time. Until now, I remember with particular warmth many games that first appeared on this console. As for some projects, for example, the Spyro and Crash Bandicoot series , I consider it to be a real living classic, a model of game design and the result of the work of ingenious programmers and engineers.

Photo: Spyro and Crash Bandicoot

Gaming, as a “strange and absolutely incomprehensible” activity for the uninitiated, captured my attention as a child. A computer appeared in our family almost simultaneously with me, as well as the PlayStation itself. I began to comprehend the art of video games while still in diapers. And honestly, it's better to spend the dashing nineties like that.

Photo: small at the computer

A computer and a game console in the house since childhood and an older brother constantly playing on them - I just had no chance not to get carried away with video games with my head. I still love games madly and treat them as a special kind of creativity. My school days only supported an incorrigible nerd in me. In those days, I quickly gathered among my classmates a “gang” of guys who also had a computer and were not indifferent to toys for him. And together we spent all our free time at and after school. When we did not play games, we talked about them.

Photo: a circle of young nerds from zero

However, at some point it began to seem to me that this was too little . I was so obsessed with games that I no longer wanted to just eagerly absorb the content they contained - I wanted supplements. I wanted to understand what was behind the scenes of the launching icons on the desktop. I wanted to dig deeper into the insides of the installed folders and see at the next launch at least some consequences of my random changes in the game’s configs. Of course, this did not lead to anything. Here are actually my modest results:

broken games on your computer
pi3Duli from his brother (he had to beg for installation discs from friends)
my huge disappointment in such a confused and suddenly fragile nature of all computer games that my playful children’s hands reached

For a while I stopped thinking about it and tried again just to enjoy the game in its original form. Cheat codes in games pacified my desire to delve into the source of games and at least somehow affect them. Well, not everyone is born Kojima. Cheats in our zero were literally an indispensable component of every game. At some point, it seems to me, they even became some kind of special challenge among developers of large games. A rare game after the release of GTA 3 appeared on the shelves without publishing a list of cheats in gaming magazines, and with the release of Vice Cityin many games increasingly fierce codes began to appear. How do you like, for example, the cheat, which causes a giant stone bust, spreading his forehead all around? Or a hefty jeep on the same huge wheels, rushing around the map in medieval strategy? Here, the authors of Age Of Empires generally visited: they would have shoved the grab gun in Mario too.

Photo: hiding under the keyboard

My attempts to be content with game content at the ready with cheats did not last long. When my grandfather gave me my first Java- enabled phone , that desire arose. Yes, about like defeated villains in movie sequels. For me, the format of Java toys turned out to be just manna from heaven. After all, I immediately wanted to dig deeper into the installers of games on my computer, and with wet eyes of happiness I found all the resources in them: from configs with game settings to all game graphics. And this time I was able to do it!

Everything turned out to be much simpler than with computer games: sprites of objects and characters simply lay in folders inside the game’s Java archive. The sprites are in full view, Carl! It just blew my roof. I took apart the games that were transmitted to the school via infraredto phones, and changed them literally beyond recognition. Sometimes, I even completely transferred sprites from one game to another so that the source code looked like a new part of some Prince of Persia. Then, at the school I would hand out surprised friends with greetings for them in the main menu or hide something from myself in the final credits of the game.

In those same years, I discovered the magazine " Gambling", Which quickly became for me and my friends, nerds, a constant source of all the news from the world of video games. The reviews of "Gambling" for new games were for us the only and most authoritative opinion deciding the fate of our pocket money. If the author of the review gave the expected game a good rating, then we did not hesitate how rabid after classes rushed to the local radio market for a novelty. They found a counter for the most operational pirates, who already had the coveted blank with a new game, threw off all their pocket money and bought the game "for everyone." We already understood what a sharing economy is. As we determined who will take the installation disk first home - this is a separate ritual and an eternal cause for quarrels.

Photo: holy of holies

Returning to Igromania, for me at some point the most valuable section of the magazine was not the reviews of the long-awaited new products, but the block with the name Igrostroy authored by Alexei Makarenkov .

Although the process of creating games in that section of the information magazine was not clearly described, it was through the articles in Igrostroy that I learned about such a thing as modding. And also about the fact that I’m not riding a roof, but doing what is called modding games. It turned out that fashion is a big direction in the industry , in which many developers are involved almost as if in a professional activity.

Alexey, in case you read it now too, I want to express my respect and appreciation for what you did in the gambling addiction of that time and continue to do it already for your personal YouTube channel. You had a great influence on me and on my decision to develop.

Photo: Igrostroy

It was at that time that a very abstract thought began to take shape in my head, but already at a subconscious level it answered my question: what would I like to do next , or even to the hackneyed “ what I want to become when I grow up ”.

I want to create fucking games.

PS dear friends, if you’re more about listening and watching, then for you a video version of this text

Why did I decide to develop games, or a nostalgic trip for zero

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