Josh
From Seeds of Time Online Wiki
Contents |
About Me
I'm a 19-year-old college student and game programmer from Wisconsin.
More information to come later...
Game Development history
Chapter 1: Before video game development
When I was a little kid, I used to make board games with video game-like themes.
The first real game development experience I had was when Playstation Underground (a disc-based magazine for PlayStation, played directly on the PlayStation) came out with a little series called "Project Wormhole" which allowed users to edit levels and other small details.. they would have you believe that you were actually creating a game, but the truth was that it was little more than a simple level editor.
Chapter 2: RPG Maker
The first video games I ever developed were using RPG Maker for PlayStation back in 2000. I was twelve years old at the time. I remember the first project I ever started was called "Magic" and it never got far at all; it was mostly just a learning experience. My first release was called Legend and it was innovative in a few ways. I had a unique system where you could gather magic stones, and either use them as consumable items to cast a certain magic spell once, or else collect a few of the stones and take them to a magic-learning shop where you could exchange the stones and a Gold fee to learn the spell permanently.
Chapter 3: Game Maker
I ran across Game Maker less than a year later, in 2001, back when Game Maker was still in version 3.3. I started a project called Ultra Mario (click here to see an old forum post I made about it-- my username back then was FinalFantasy2005, or Final2005 for short). Ultra Mario ended up just being a learning experience, and it never was completely released.
Game Maker 4.0 was released before long, and I released my first GM game: Knuckles's World Tour, a Sonic-like game. It was a cool game, and I later made a sequel, Sonic Boom. I completed about a dozen games with Game Maker over the course of around two years, and you can still download many of them here. The game from back then that I'm most proud of is Stealth Prankster.. and I do intend to return to the series one day.
Chapter 4: C++
In 2003, when I was in eighth grade, I ran across a C++ book and decided it was time to starting learning a real programming language. I learned it and wrote some small applications, but I didn't complete any major C++ projects until Ultimate Tower Defense.
Chapter 5: Distorted Horizon (the predecessor to SoTO)
In 2004, I taught myself PHP and wrote Distorted Horizon. Despite being a no-budget game and having only about 10-20 active members, it was very fun and those who played told me that regularly. It was basically a very simplified version of Seeds of Time Online. The battle system was similar, as was the inventory screen and the process of equipping/using/selling items. But it did not have player-versus-player combat, nor player trading. It was good while it lasted: the open beta lasted from Dec. 27, 2004 (at midnight) to Feb. 2005. I was a sophomore in high school at the time.
Later on (still in 2005 if I remember correctly), I tried to get back into the browser-based game scene again with a project called Empire of Mutants which was later converted into Metropolis Online (like DH and SoTO but with a huge focus on player-owned real estate, and with an active map system). I dropped the project before release.
Chapter 6: Seeds of Time Online
In the summer and/or fall of 2007, a few months after graduating from high school, I thought about starting up a new browser-based game. On September 11, 2007, I sat down and started writing some code, and the SoTO project began. It only took me about a month to get the essentials down; at that point, the game was more-or-less playable. Seeing how the game was basically ready, I decided to set Halloween 2007 as the launch date, but I released early (on Oct. 27, 2007) since it was definitely ready before then and there wasn't much reason to wait.
