This was one of my favorite episodes to date! Really took me back to the early 90s when my cousin and I would draw and exchange game ideas on paper for hours on end. I wish we'd made more games to show for it! (And I wish I had the aborted builds for what we failed to finish.)

JRPGs and kid-made games really do love to start in bedrooms. I think most my first ZZT games did.

I just finished this today. I didn't realize that there was such a big community around developing for the atari "posthumously". I mean I knew it was popular to make romhacks for other old consoles, but I had no idea about this. It's cool, I'll have to play his game now!

Gosh, yeah, the Minecraft project is SO huge. Like, it's not just terabytes of random zip files, he took the time to build tools to analyze and make it digestable. So if you want to explore a representative sampling of random Minecraft maps from the archive, there's The Reef maps. If you want a bunch of data to build Mastodon bots with, there's The Minecraft Geologic Survey. It must have been an enormous amount of effort to put all that stuff together. And pretty much once a year he takes another huge sample.

He also has the Ephemeral Software Collection which, among other things, scrapes jam games from Github. Important work!

I'd say every tool has its "grain", and Allegro's bread and butter was really "draw bitmaps on top of other bitmaps", with certain effects like scaling and rotation being very easy to add. But other things, which may have been straightforward if you had written the blitting code and were able to make tweaks to it, were much more difficult.

I remember putting together a demo game to show off my "skills" in the early TPU days, where I tried to build the most audiovisually impressive thing I could. The thing that gave me the most trouble: I wanted to reproduce the end-of-level screen-melting effect from Doom, and getting that to run fast was hard.

That game also had:

a pretty 3D fractal landscape generated by a VistaPro demo I got from a book called Virtual Reality Madness & More huge 3d-rendered characters modeled in a tool called Imagine (I couldn't figure out how to texture pupils on his googly sphere eyes, so I just drew them on afterwards in NeoPaint and hoped I got them in vaguely the same place every frame (I didn't)) a title screen that I'm pretty sure had both gratuitous scaling and rotation oh, and I animated some extruded text as a "company logo" in I think maybe TrueSpace 3D? custom fonts EVERYWHERE; I feel like I must've had a tool for Windows that would export a TTF font as a bitmap that Allegro knew how to treat as a bitmap font. But if you wanted text in your game, you were probably gonna export a bitmap font. All I used it for was, like, "press start", and displaying your score, but I'm sure I had at least two fonts.

I definitely remember having to do a lot of fiddling to mash everything from these random sources into a sensible 256-colour palette. I had specialized commandline tools for palette generation & re-importing.

In general, I had a bunch of disparate free-or-pirated tools for creating visuals, and I used them about as naively as you could possibly imagine, and I suspect that had a lot to do with how my games ended up looking. It probably was not far off from the process that people making OHRRPGCE games were going through. Even my 3D stuff was made in tools that were designed to be accessible. I had a copy of 3DS Max, but I couldn't figure out how to make it do anything - I just knew it was "professional".

@Shadsy has written an in-depth essay called The Mario Fangame Myth about MFGG for the Lost Histories Jam that is very worth reading.

Interesting to hear from (and reminisce with) somebody that passed through the rpg2knet.com community. As it's creator I was always one or two steps removed from the people using it for its intended purpose, so it was a fun trip to hear from "the other side" almost two decades later!

Have you talked to the man upstairs?

Youtube Video