While in college, the main projects I worked on were the following:
I started programming a 2d arcade game called Ecoheroes. It was loosely inspired by the simulation part of a game called Actraiser, but it turned out to be more of a shoot 'em up.
After seeing that Ecoheroes actually worked, I decided to make some improvements to it in order to be able to sell it. I worked on it as time permitted up through the summer of 2003.
At that point, I still needed artwork and music. I managed to convince people to do art and music for the game, though I couldn't get as much art as I wanted. I actually paid them for this - not much, but it was still more than the total sales of the game.
In November 2003, I started distributing the game. I only sold 3 copies.
The main problems with Ecoheroes were the following:
In December 2003, I started programming a 2d RPG called Mythale RPG. This time, I used better coding practices from day 1, though there was still room for improvement. In a few short months, Mythale RPG's code was more or less complete, but the game wasn't really how I intended it to be. There were a number of features that I added but never improved upon. The level up system was supposed to be the coolest feature, but it was more tedious than anything. I only created a 4-area town, a forest, and a mine. There was essentially no art or music for the game.
Even so, Mythale RPG was far superior to Lunatic Ambition. It had the features an RPG is supposed to have; it just wasn't particularly fun.
Sometime in early 2004, I tried to improve Ecoheroes in the hopes of making it into a game that people would actually buy. If anything, I made it significantly worse. And then Java 1.4.1_02 was released. Both games started crashing under the new version of Java. The sensible thing to do would be to embed the older JRE with Ecoheroes, but I gave up on both games.
In the summer of 2004, I started programming Bot Asylum over from scratch. It was never a serious project, just something I wanted to do. The program was better than before, but I did even less scripting. Since Bot Asylum was based on using finite state machines to use prescripted responses, it was doomed from the beginning. (I was aware that this approach was doomed, but I wanted to experiment with it all the same.)
I worked on it sporadically for about 6 months before abandoning it altogether.
Early in 2005, I started writing a tutorial about programming games in Java. The general idea was that I would program a number of simple games and explain how to program those games in the tutorial. Unmix was the only full game I actually completed for the tutorial. It was a much improved version of Dr. Mixer's Laboratory. I gave it away for free.
After a few months, I decided that I would rather program some more games before finishing the tutorial, so I discontinued the tutorial to work on an RPG. I called it "Rabbits" and made a game like the "Rabbit Warriors" scenario that I had started as a test scenario for Lunatic Ambition. Aside from my pathfinding code from Mythale RPG, I didn't reuse any code from either of the 2 previous RPGs I programmed.
In July 2006, I finished Rabbits (although I didn't acquire music for it until a bit later). I had originally planned another to include another town, but dropped it from the game to work on another project.
That other project was a breakout clone called Nanotron with Eduardo Ramirez. Its main difference from other breakout games is that the germs you have to hit with the ball move back and forth like in Space Invaders.
In November 2006, we made Nanotron available for testing. The general consensus was that it didn't have enough features, so we started revising the game.
While working on Nanotron, I started programming something called Vulcan Compiler at the same time. It was intended to create PHP text adventure games from a simple scripting language. However, the guy who was going to generate content for it actually wanted to work on something else entirely. I abandoned Vulcan Compiler and concentrated on Nanotron. I mention this project only because I would like to work on it again someday.
I moved most of the content from the Cow God Games to the Orbital Cows Entertainment website during April. The new site essentially replaced both the Cow God Games and In-orbit Concepts websites, though both sites still existed for a while.
In May 2007, the Nanotron beta test took place. Nanotron was finally released in June 2007.
After Nanotron was released, we started work on a sellable version of Unmix. This new version of Unmix includes 3 games in one package, called Lucky's Puzzle Carnival. The other two games in the package are called Color Mix and Memory Search.
In November 2007, we selected the final price point for Nanotron. At the lower price point, it generated some sales, though not enough to matter. We chose not to pay for any advertising until we had several games available.
I spent most of December 2007 updating the website. The game list is now backed by an SQL database, and we started selling games as an affiliate with BMT Micro. There were some other updates as well, and fiddling around with the website is something I've been doing often ever since.
In April 2008, I eliminated the cowgodgames.com website entirely and moved the little remaining material to this site. Over the course of 2008, the Orbital Cows Entertainment website evolved a great deal.
Lucky's Puzzle Carnival's development dragged on and on. The strange thing is that the programming and art for actual games was done in a period of several months. I spent most of the year developing more reusable library code, and then I added a world tour feature right at the end of the development cycle. It took Eduardo a while to get the art for the world tour feature done. Had I added that feature at the beginning, the game would have been done much sooner.
In January 2009, I began development on a 2d platformer called Kiki's Candyland.
In March 2009, Lucky's Puzzle Carnival was finally released. For more about the development cycle, read the Lucky's Puzzle Carnival Post-Mortem.
Also in March 2009, we decided not to bother with Kiki's Candyland. Instead, we would work on a remake of Rabbits. The remake will be called Rabbit Bureau of Investigation, and it will include an expanded version of the plot that Rabbits would have had if I could have gotten art for it back then.
I was a little miffed about throwing away the work I had done on Kiki's Candyland, but I would rather work on RBI anyways.
During 2009, LPC was updated (three times) to version 1.03 and Nanotron to version 1.02. The changes made in these versions were small but necessary. A bundle was created including both games.
By the start of 2010, little had been accomplished in the development of RBI.
In February 2010, we rearranged our business structure. The business is now called "Orbital Cows Software". Rather than being a partnership, it is a sole proprietorship where I send royalties to my previous partner. This requires much less paperwork at tax time.
Copyright (C) 2006-2010 Steven Fletcher. All rights reserved.
