My 20 year old Dream

As a 10 year old boy, I received my first proper computer... Ok, I had a Sinclair ZX81 before it... but the Amiga 500 was my first proper computer.

But after receiving this wondrous machine for Birthmas (Christmas and Birthday present combined)... and exhausting all that that the "Screen Gems" bundled games had to offer, I set about transferring my ZX81 programming skills to this new platform... within weeks I was badgering my father to buy me "Amos the creator", the new all-in-one programming package that I had seen reviewed in all the Magazines!!!

Spent every spare minute plugging away with AMOS, and eventually including more and more inline assembler to get better speed (before moving to ASM after I had built up a nice library of functions/macros to do the dirty work)... I was churning out little games that despite my graphical ineptitude were quite fun to play... I would give out disks to my friends at school and get feedback and make the games better...

But as my skills improved less and less people at school had Amigas... By the time I got my A1200, and was doing AGA only stuff... only one other person had an A1200...

I was stuck on the Amiga, I knew the hardware inside out, and had a large enough software/hardware investment to delay any purchase of a "PC" until the year 2000... my dream of publishing a game was basically over.

I needed a PC for University work... Spreadsheets, essays, specialist Chemistry software... etc...

When the time came for me to get a proper job, I was writing small apps/bits of code to do various tasks... and my main focus shifted to music... which lead to my purchase of a Mac in 2005...

To cut long story short, once the Mac moved to intel, I decided to give game programming a go again... but found the OSX API and Object-C too difficult to get on with... So I decided to play with SDL and regular C... I build a few little games to amuse myself, but in this world of 3D megabudget FPS RPG action adventure games I knew my dream of game development was dead.

Then the game changed in 2007... Apple release the iPhone, and all of a sudden, small 2D games that were only meant to be played for 5mins at a time became all the rage... Sadly, I was too busy with "real work" to waste time learning this new iPhone platform

Then a friend of mine, announced that he was releasing an iPhone app (called Gold Chart)... This sparked my interest again... so I set aside 2 months to learn the API and Objective-C... I gave myself the goal of releasing whatever I had ready at the end of that two month period on the App Store... so I ploughed away, and success!!!

I did it!

In the end I came to realise that Objective-C is actually quite a brilliant programming language, and Apple have done an amazing job with the iPhone Operating system... Their developer tools are totally free (if you own a Mac) and do all the hard work for you...

My app was released on March the 16th (3 days after my 30th Birthday)... and I'm really proud of it.

"Puny Humans", is a stupid little game where you get to destroy a little population of people who run around your screen... graphically, it is totally in the style of the Amiga games (circa 1990) and while, it hasn't exactly set the world alight... It is selling.

I'm never going to be a big time game developer, but... I will always have a warm feeling form the knowledge that I did to some degree achieve my 20 year old dream.

Thanks for listening, I hope I will have inspired maybe one more person to give it a go. You never know, you might actually make it big