A Game Dev’s Story, Part XII – Putting It All Together and Going Indie!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 14, 2012

While it’s tempting to end this series on the thirteenth installment, we’re really at the point where the story is “more of the same.” The story is far from over, but things really come to enough of a conclusion here to end things. So here goes. As excited as I was to find work at […]

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A Game Dev’s Story, Part XI: The End of an Era

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 10, 2012

So at this point, you probably have a pretty good idea of how I got to be a game developer. Normally, at this point, the most interesting parts would be behind us. But the story is about to take a twist. But first, there’s the death of Singletrac. The first two years of SingleTrac’s existence […]

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A Game Dev’s Story, Part X: Racing Along

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 25, 2012

We were all pretty exhausted by the time Twisted Metal and Warhawk shipped. Singletrac had a pretty liberal vacation policy, but few had been able to take advantage of it because we were all working 70 hour work-weeks. But we had two more games scheduled for release in less than a year, so we couldn’t […]

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A Game Dev’s Story, Part IX: King of the World

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 3, 2012

(You can catch up on the whole story here.) So the last time I left off, we were knee-deep in the development of Twisted Metal and Warhawk. While massive crunch-mode hours and stuff sounds cool and everything, and I was still thrilled at having the kind of job I’d dreamed about since my first confused […]

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A Game Dev’s Story, Part VIII: Learning the Ropes

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 28, 2012

My first day at SingleTrac was chaotic. They had not received a shipment of computers for the expected new hires, yet. So I had no computer. The main development “bullpen” was a bunch of folding tables and thrift-store chairs, with some developers using their own computers brought from home. My first day was a lot […]

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A Game Dev’s Story, Part VII: Wouldn’t It Be Cool If…?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 14, 2012

Okay, I had a short hiatus with this series simply because there were far too many interesting and newsworthy things to post about over the last couple of weeks. I’ve got a small backlog of blog posts to go out, and topics to discuss, which is actually a pleasant change of pace for me.  Usually […]

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A Game Dev’s Story, Part VI: Indie Before Indie Was Even Uncool

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 27, 2012

My dad had an overdeveloped sense of my skills as a game programmer when I was whipping out adventure games and simple arcade-style clones. He owned a tiny holding company – which are sometimes derogatorily referred to as “shell companies.” Mainly it was there to be a “parent” company to for the entrepreneurial idea of […]

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A Game Dev’s Story, Part V: Language Skills

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 22, 2012

As I attempted to imitate my favorite arcade games on the Commodore 64, I found myself running up against a pretty major limitation: Speed. Specifically, the lack thereof when running my homemade games.  I learned a lot of tricks (most of which I’ve forgotten, now) to making my BASIC programs faster. But while those optimizations […]

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A Game Dev’s Story, Part IV: Sixty-Four

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 17, 2012

When released, the Commodore 64 was quite simply mass-produced awesomeness. We didn’t really know it at the time… it was just another “home computer” released in a sea of competitors. It came from a company that had specialized in business systems (the name was “Commodore Business Machines,”), with one weak home computer entry (the VIC-20, […]

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A Game Dev’s Story, Part III: Grand Designs

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 15, 2012

In our previous installment, our hero (er, me) was learning how to program on a tiny, super-cheap computer with 1K of memory. Er, the computer, that is. Our hero has slightly more memory, we’d hope. While I was playing on a toy computer, the arcade / video game boom was hitting full swing — the […]

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A Game Dev’s Story, Part II – The Kilobyte

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 13, 2012

Because of the binary nature of computers, they tend to handle things in twos – especially powers of two. The fundamental states used repeatedly by digital machines to represent everything is “on” (or one), or “off” (zero). Now, by itself, that doesn’t seem to be a lot of information. But then you can combine bits […]

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A Game Dev’s Story – Part I: Discovering the Future

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 9, 2012

They say that a good dramatic story has the hero set out on his or her journey after “two nudges and a push.”  I don’t know that I’m all that heroic or dramatic, but I guess the beginnings of my story as a game developer also has two nudge and a push. My first significant […]

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