Fourteen Years of Development in Screenshots

The year is 2001.  I’m in high school.  I’ve been making games since I was ten, a lot of stuff in BASIC & Visual Basic.  In high school, I start learning C++.

I’m super into Ultima Online at the time, and I really want to be able to help build the world as a player.  There’s nothing really like that, though, so I realize I’m going to have to build it myself.  (Oddly enough, five years later my first industry gig had me working with a lot of people who previously worked on Ultima).

I played with some MUD’s that had limited player world building, and wanted to capture that feeling in a graphical world.  I was also working on a Half-Life mod called HT-Mod that had players taking turns attacking and defending player bases.  I wanted to bring that world building into a larger, persistent universe.

Thus begins HT-Mud, the origin of 8BitMMO.

12/1/01 12:30 pm

I’m not sure how long I had been working on the game at this point, other than I’m pretty sure I started sometime in 2001.  This is the first ever screenshot of it.

In the above shot, you can see it loading a very basic map from a text file, and… that’s pretty much all it could do.

Keep in mind at this time I’m still learning all the nuances of c++.  Because the best project to start in on when you’re learning a language is the single most technically challenging genre you could possibly tackle.  😛

12/1/01 9:40PM

Here’s a 3d renderer of the map file, rendering the top faces of the tiles in the map file.

12/2/01

Now with side walls.

12/2/01 3:26pm

And textures!

12/29/01 5:14pm

Apparently adding transparent textures took a month and/or I got distracted.  Not sure why I thought transparency was the most critical thing for me to add at this point, but meh.  Perhaps I was working through a tutorial?

3/23/02

And thus begins the first of many total scraps of the codebase.  As a new c++ programmer at this time, I decided working in 3D was a bit much, and decided to simplify down to isometric 2D using SDL.

2002ish

Minor graphics glitch…

7/25/02

Networking!  Looks like you can move around (you play as the dog) and chat.

7/26/02

Multiple floor support:

7/28/02

Multiple map support.  This is probably map id 1 or so (in 8BitMMO, you are probably familiar with playing on Map 65 and 66).

This also is showing a bug where if people walk on top of each other, it creates phantom players all over the place.

10/04/02

Inventory and beginnings of persistent database support.

I would have just been starting college at this time.  In hindsight, I have no idea how I managed to move, start college, and still be working on the game.

10/06/02

I start getting word out for beta sign-ups:

Being on the front page of Blue’s News, even just a small link, felt like a huge accomplishment.  And it got some beta sign-ups too!

Here’s the first website:

(WTF, thirteen years later, dragons still not a playable race?  Where did I go wrong?!)

2002ish

Loading screen.  Ruby (the dog) would fly across the screen while the world downloaded in the background (no streaming yet!), and the text at the top marquee scrolled.

Super basic login screen.

10/12/02

Launcher WIP:

This was a separate app written in WxWindows (which later became WxWidgets) that kept your game up to date.  It used text based config files and FTP to update to the latest version.  I don’t recall if I originally wrote this as a launcher for ht-mod, or it was originally a launcher for ht-mud, but years later it ended up becoming the basis of one of my other sideprojects, Archive Games.

10/19/02

Installer & Launcher ready for testing with friends & beta sign-ups:

2002ish?

Not much to do yet as a player, other than pick up party hats.  With the addition of the first building block and the window pane, finally you can kind of customize your house.  But at this point, I find out just how much of a pain it is to make rotated isometric tiles.  For the life of me, I just couldn’t get them to line up right in whatever image program I was using.  Possibly because I was using corel photo paint, but I didn’t know better.

Well… you know what that means…

Yep.

REWRITE!