Plan for Paul Dana

Long Strange Trip, Part 1: The Idea

What a long strange trip it's been...

How stupidly we went about most of it.

I started in March of 2003, a lone coder with a mission: make a game prototype first. Before making a webpage, before forming a team, before making a design document.

It is now Aug of 2005. I have a team, and we have a product: Flash Bios, a 3D Arcade Strategy game. We are in beta and we will ship sometime this year.

In my wildest dreams I did not think it would take us over two years to finish this game. After all...I thought really hard for months and months before I chose a game idea to go with. I sought (and thought I was following) the advice of experienced professionals. I spent a year learning the Torque Engine before trying to make a game with it; doing things like creating the Turrets resource and learning about the art path, etc. I took the humble path. Even though I had over 13 years of professional 3D graphics coding under my belt I still though of myself as a newbie. I would seek advice. I would follow it.

Your asking...then what in God's name happened?

I will tell you. We learned what not to do. The hard way. Blundering our way through this, Jason and I have finally learned how to follow the advice we were receving from the start.

My friend and mentor, Joe Maruschak, has advised me from the very start. He has convinced me to take time I don't really have to write this series of blogs, and tell people the story of our long strange trip.

We are going to highlight the places where we went wrong, how we failed to understand it or to belive the advice we got, and our own views on where we failed to "get it".

Oids

Fugly UFO Donut headed for the Mother Ship

First you need to know about the original 2D arcade style game, called Oids. You can download Oids right now and play it yourself if you like. Be warned this is an ancient game that ran on the Atari ST and the original black and white Macintosh. The download contains an Atari ST emulator as well as the game.

Oids worked like this: your job was to save all the Oids on a Planet before you moved onto the next Planet in the System. Oids were these little robots held in prisons. The Mother Ship would spit you out and you would have to go find the Oids prisons and destroy them to free the Oids, being careful not to shoot the Oids! You would have to destroy any defenses guarding the Oids and then land on flat areas near the Oids. They would hop on board after you landed. Once your ship was holding the max (8) you would have to bring them back to the Mother Ship. Once you freed all the Oids in this way you would move onto the next Planet.

Your ship, the Oids, and all defenses were one-shot-one-kill. If your ship touched anything (other than a flat area during landing) it would blow up. To protect yourself you had a shield that would slowly run down as you used it. Your ship expended fuel when you thrust. You had to eventually find a refueling station and land near it, or bring 8 Oids back to Mother Ship and she would refuel you.

Next Blog...

Read My Next Blog to find out how the original prototype played out.

You will hear how the prototype inspired a team to materialize in front of my eyes, what joe had to say about the prototype, and how we followed some of his advice, but mostly failed to "get it".

Eventually you will find out how, despite being a bunch of utter noobs, we ended up with this:

Flash's stylish ship, the Scandisc and an antiviral bit

Finally, speaking of long strange trips. Some of you may recall that my last April Fools .plan was about going to work for a guy who discovered Atlantis. As I told you then, although it was a joke and I never worked for Robert Samarst, but he really did discover Atlantis.

No kidding.

Also he finally released images he obtained on his expedition last summer. I have been waiting along time to see them. It represents a higher resolution scan of the "wall" he found, confirming what was seen in the lower resolution scan. Ie...that its a wall that travels in a straight line, keeps a consistent width, takes a perfect right angle bend, and keeps on going.

How awesome is this?

Now after your done gaping at that, Read My Next Blog.