16 year old me with qbasic would have been really impressed, and honestly 43 year old me is also impressed. The final version of that corridor in the DOS version really is something to be proud of.
Honestly it’s a lot easier to code today than it was back then due to having the web at your fingertips. Also if you do the wrong thing in asm and crash dosbox it’s very quick to restart.
@@eviltrout Sadly it's quite the opposite to me. I coded a lot with C16 BASIC, Amiga BASIC, AMOS, BlitzBasic and QBASIC back then; a fully Dungeon Master clone made in AMOS, with a working gameplay and level save format (but all graphics stolen from the original game xD )was my best product I think, but all the modern languages are incomprehensible to me, I tried it dozens of times. It's like they made coding intentionally worse, with all these unneeded parentheses, semicolons, brackets and whatever .. Yeah, of course 'hello world' works in any language, but somehow it feels stupidly exhausting and is no fun to code in all the modern things :(
This is amazing! I had N.N. on a Shareware disk as a kid, and rediscovered it while streaming last year. It stood out as memorable amongst many other hundreds of games. In many ways, it was genuinely more entertaining and engaging. Thank you so much for sharing this.
Great story and presentation. The remastered hall effect in the DOS-version looked really cool! The Godot version turned out looking great as well I think. Well done :)
I know a similar game that's definitely coded by a teenager, never completed, and spread around on shareware CD-ROMs... It was called Incunabula: The Untold Secrets (or "incun"). I believe it was also coded in QBASIC. I'd love to see an even slightly more finished version of it but I'm sure it's a pipe dream.
Thank you for taking the time to make this video! I really enjoy videos like this where developers reflect on old projects and share it with great storytelling approach :)
This was really enjoyable! BBS-era shareware culture is an interesting topic, and you've gotta love the vibe of reverse-engineering long-obsolete file formats. I also hadn't heard about Mark Ferrari's artworks before. They're mind-blowing, and the fact their motion is created entirely using palette swaps just takes it to another level. Great stuff!
I feel this so much. Have recently done bugfixes to games I created over 25 years ago, and am doing some DOS development as a DOS port of a new point and click adventure that is being developed for Windows , Mac OS and Linux. Glad to see I'm not the only one interested in doing that kind of stuff and playing around with their own old source code too. Loved your write-up... er... video-up.
Looks like the algorithm likes your content! I'd love to see more of this type of thing from you, you come across with a sincerity and matter-of-fact approach that makes your narrative very compelling.
This was such a beautiful video. Presevation isn't always about preserving something. You can lock a book inside a lead vault and it will probably never be destroyed; but it will also never be read or inspire anyone. So to see you talk about your own work and build an interesting narrative around it (in the form of remaking it) was really interesting. I can't imagine how strange some of this must have been for you. I like this format of showing older software and showing the problems we have keeping them relevant (like your last video). Keep it up.
Thanks for your compliments. I do think it’s a shame that most software people write is left behind, especially when they put so much hard work into it.
I also started my journey in QBasic, I remember making my own paint program, and I called it Squimp, and the files it saved were basically .sqm which was just the raw color data. These files were used in an RPG I made where you changed screens when you walked past the edge of the screen. Fun times. Now I dilly-dally in C and I just can't get that far into my games, because I have no ideas :D
This was an interesting video! I enjoyed the topic, delivery, and format. I'm going to check out the rest of your channel. Thanks for making this kind of content!
Very cool to go back to a game you made years ago and improving it with some modern tools as well as using "retro" tools like Borland C++. Great video, thanks for posting!
I can see why Borland C++ was so popular. It works very well. It’s a shame that software like that eventually dies out so I was glad I was able to take it for a spin.
Really nice video. I‘m afraid to say: I like your old version a lot more than the upgraded/remastered one. Sorry, but I like that old style you chose back in the days.
I started my programming journey by playing around with QBasic as a kid too. I only did some really basic "Choose your own adventure" type games and then attempted a text parser which I never really completed. In those days I was mostly interested in Sierra adventure games so that's what I tried to emulate. What I really like about this throwback is the contrast between coding then and now. We've gone from having to handle the mechanics directly to having pre-built engines that can do that for us. The progress that has been achieved over those few decades that personal computing has existed is truly mind-blowing.
On one hand it’s fun to have so much control over the hardware - but I know as a kid I only learned that because I had to. It would have been much more fun to just prototype my ideas with an engine if I could.
I've found that when I look at my old source code from that time, it's actually quite legible, mostly being a list of things which need to happen in order with some GOTOs for flow. When I try to fix it I end up using shorter and more confusing fancy syntax, needless byte/bit packing and silly optimizations, splitting code into "proper functions" which often just means time wasted scrolling around in the IDE to find the bits which did uh, what again? Setting up variable scopes and arguments/references can be a time waster too. Often I end up so entangled that I can't finish the thing I did with relative ease as child.
Sounds like you've become overburdened with SMART PEOPLE things injected into your system, instead of Doing things to do things however things get done - unconcerned about SMART. I wish you a recovery brutha. 🤡🌡
@@JB-mm5ff Rustifying unchanging parts of the codebase sounds fine, while also bearing humourous symbollism, but it's probably gonna spread like a cancer to New Features isn't it.. 🤡
I tried contacting them while I was working on the video but unfortunately received no reply. There was a recording of them playing and reacting to the game that I would have loved to include but it's now missing.
Some of my earliest memories are of my dad helping me with code for a text adventure in QBasic. I never finished any of my many experiments in QBasic but I look back those memories fondly. I probably wouldn't be programming today if not for that memory. Anyway, this video hit some major nostalgia notes for me. Good work!
The intro to this video really made me wish I had saved all my games I coded as a child. I DID upload them to YOYO games when it was still up because I used Game Maker Studios as my game engine. They shut down the website and with that most of the games on it. It's still nice to look back on memories and now that I am coding again, I can use those memories and lessons for my new games. Still, I really wish I had them. Thank you for this video! I was looking up level design and this one popped up... glad I clicked on it man. Cheers!
I subscribed to your channel and this is the first video I looked at. Advice on 'Taking it further' and 'Sharing the artefacts far and wide' was what sold your content, in my opinion. Great style and delivery. Respect and love from Istanbul.
Thank you for the video! That was a very interesting experience. I'm sure we all have a bunch of creative stuff we did when younger. It is kind of beautiful how we don't think about how successful or feasible it even is, we just do it because we want to. In my case, it was terrible, and I wouldn't even dream of sharing it with other people, let alone remake it! This was really inspiring. Like your older self is telling your younger self: "You don't have the technical knowledge to do this yet, but you will, keep at it!". I totally understand why it stayed somewhere in your mind for the past 5 years :') Definitely subscribing. I don't know where this channel is going, but I want to see it! Also, that Mark Ferrari art is INCREDIBLE. Like... DAMN!
Funnest .VOC file ripping source is from the demo version of Syndicate: American Revolt. Want a satisfying shotgun sound, or an entire air-strike? Yep, that's your file base for it :) Ahh, the good old days. Learnt a tiny bit of Turbo Pascal and used the SPX library that could play that kind of stuff back then. *Through a PC speaker, without a soundcard!*. I thought that was amazing at the time. I had no idea how they did that in Megalomania and Space Hulk and found out how, kinda. I was vaguely thinking there could be a win95 .DLL written for it, so no-one would ever have to pay for a soundcard, ever again! How wrong I was.... Port $42 is your byte-schmazzer for that :) Weirdly enough, you could probably use an entire thread or core for that kind of stuff, to modularize it away from main gameplay threads, and never have that interrupt interfere with game or graphics cycles. As well as scare the beejesus out of people without speakers or headphones plugged in, that their computer can do more than "beep" out of that little/huge box they paid for.
Another great video, really enjoy your stuff :) I have no idea what you are talking about most of the time, but, as with Digital Foundry, I simply enjoy listening to whatever you are talking about. And sometimes I actually learn something :p
Some people say I provide too little detail! It’s a balancing act. I hope that non developers can enjoy the videos even if they don’t understand every little thing. I’ll probably experiment with some videos that are much less technical, too, to see how they go over.
Thoroughly enjoyed the video 🙌 To imagine you guys made all that at only 13 years old. Something tells me this was not your final project, so will be eagerly awaiting another episode ✨
Weird, I found this game on mobygames looking for a different game, was curious about it, searched it on YT for gameplay, found nothing, clicked on something else and it recommended this vid. Neat.
Everything you say in this video is so true. Thank you very much for sharing this story with us. This really resonated with me and who knows where this will take me. I'm aware that you don't know me, but thank you so, so much. I owe you. I wish you all the best for the future and have a nice day.
Oh wow I remember playing Nocturnal Nightmares from a shareware CD! I wish I had held on to all the Quickbasic games I made when I was a kid. Great video!
I'm currently doing something similar with one of my first games I ever developed. It was my "Dream game" and I didn't have the skills or knowledge to make a good game at the time. It's a buggy, difficult, incomplete mess of a prototype that I gave up on when I realized I didn't have the ability to make it good yet. It was impressive for one of my first games, but my new remake of the game so far is a world of a difference. It's incredible to see just how much modern tools have made creating games so much more accessible. I look at assembly or quickbasic and my palms start sweating. I'm going to stick to C# lol. But wow, I love learning about the creative solutions that came from the hardware and memory restrictions of the time. What a cool video!
Interesting story, thanks for sharing That reminds me of a tale of my own, I've played old dos game called Tactical Battle Simulator as a kid, shareware As an adult I've played it again a few years ago (found the full version to download), found a bug in it! and tried finding the guy who made it on social media just to talk about it, but never found the guy.
Man, you're such a nice guy! You are good at telling things and your topics are really interesting I think you can make videos *you* *want* and more people will find and like it. Not sure if it is a good advise, but I'm happy UA-cam recommended me your channel. Also I'm a bit obsessed by all kinds of preserving and remastering games, music, movies, photos, etc. and fixing old code. Personally I've only restored a few old family photos so far but perhaps it still helps to respect such things. Not sure about this paragraph but I'll leave it🌚
In the BBS time I used to sell shareware on floppies on flea markets, because as you said not everyone was using BBS. I created a catalog with screenshots and info and people could just pick a game or software. The screenshots were all black and white and I printed these with a dot matrix printer xD Personally I also created some stuff back then, not games but some tools and spread them around as shareware. Your game looks really cool. Didn't know you could make such graphical stuff in qbasic.
@@eviltrout I was like 13y old or so, it was profitable enough for me xD peanuts but it was fun. Later in the 2000s I started my own shareware websites in Germany like Tucows. I was making good money with ads and affiliate - if someone bought a license I got a cut. Passive income! Good old times.
I made some dumb shareware games in the 90s as well, and several years ago got a phone call out of the blue from someone who sounded like they were very young trying to get a copy of the full version. I had to give them the bad news that I’d lost the source code years ago and had no way to provide it to them. Because of this experience I thought about remaking the game in a more modern environment, and maybe I’ll finally do that now.
That was a fun watch. What made it great is how the whole video tells a story that is quite inspirational. I have dabbled a bit with creating games in Java and opengl in the past, maybe I should check out Godot, it seems fun to use.
It’s brutal isn’t it? Martin really helped me out but I also have much much more code over the years that I haven’t kept and is now gone. The best thing you can do is release stuff. Or better yet, open source it.
That was quite some improvement to the original game there, I always wanted to be able to code but never really gotten into it, I am good at using Dos with old computers and stuff but I am more a technical and mechanical person with focus on building circuits and Tube amplifiers and repairing stuff or making music and many other things, But coding feels like a hassle for me. But when I make the things I do I always want to push it a little bit further to widen my perspective and I always done this. keep upp the good work
Cool story and I really like the improvements that you made to the "remastered" version of the game. Sorry to hear that it seemed that not a lot of people bought the version from 30 years before so this might explain why you did not do a full version of the game. I did have some experience programming on my Atari 800Xl with the built in basic program but my games were mostly text based games since I was not aware of how to implement graphic routines.
I have looked at old code I wrote 10 or more years ago and said to myself, "What the heck was I thinking? What does this section do? Why did I do it this convoluted way?" But of course we all learn new and better ways to do things which is why our style changes over time. Since then I definitely include a lot of comments in the code to explain what each section does so that when I come back to it later I don't have to spend a great amount of time trying to understand how it works.
@@eviltrout I haven't done any programming for years, so I wanted to challenge myself. Recently I made the pledge to myself that I would write an assembly game for the C64. Looking forward to accomplishing something. One great thing about doing that nowadays is that there are WAY better tools for programming on the C64 (and other retro systems - even the Atari 2600 has modern programming tools!)
Qbasic! I use to peruse websites checking out all sorts of games. Had fun with it trying to make an Angband style RPG, and a ship shooter. Never got too far, but my coding buddy at the time continued down that path and codes professionally now. I wonder if he has any of our old source code for our broken programs... Anyway, great video! What a fun trip down memory lane.
Amazing times, like other commenters, I wish I had known how to market and release games at the time, early 90's. I watch GDC videos about those times and so many guys were just like me, a guy in a bedroom making games, and here I thought I had to be some giant Microsoft or something. I remember hearing the story of the Prince of Persia author, literally just one guy making a game. Or Sid Meier's Pirates was written originally in BASIC... it just seemed so impossible as kids but looking back I knew I always had it in me if I had just pushed a little harder.
Oh man.. voc files! I completely forgot about those also! Wow that brings me back hah. Also, have you considered using Open Watcom? This is a modern open source compiler that supports dos. Perhaps the optimizer in this compiler is good enough to not require assembly for full screen redraws (maybe). 13:27 When adding this to a game, keep accessability in mind however. A game like this would make me sick quite quickly. I always have to turn off view bobbing or any kind of camera shakes.
Wait, an alpha of Doom leaked a year before its release? I didn't realize it leaked that early. Also wow, your mobygames mentions ForumWarz... I used to play that tons
The scrolling corridor in DOS version doesn't feel perspective correct and it's bugging me out. Think about it, nearest tiles should take up a larger space horizontally than further away ones. I imagine there's a way to render out an index texture out of Blender or something?
I'm pretty certain my perspective calculation was wrong. If I were releasing an actual game and not just a programming experiment I'd do more work researching how to build the tables :)
What programming language would you recommend for starting making this kind of game or 2d sidescroller today? I guess it's a good idea to aim for it being for smartphones rather than on a PC?
16 year old me with qbasic would have been really impressed, and honestly 43 year old me is also impressed. The final version of that corridor in the DOS version really is something to be proud of.
Honestly it’s a lot easier to code today than it was back then due to having the web at your fingertips. Also if you do the wrong thing in asm and crash dosbox it’s very quick to restart.
@@eviltrout That only makes the absolute wizardry in some antique demos/programs all that more impressive. 🥲
@@eviltrout Sadly it's quite the opposite to me. I coded a lot with C16 BASIC, Amiga BASIC, AMOS, BlitzBasic and QBASIC back then; a fully Dungeon Master clone made in AMOS, with a working gameplay and level save format (but all graphics stolen from the original game xD )was my best product I think, but all the modern languages are incomprehensible to me, I tried it dozens of times. It's like they made coding intentionally worse, with all these unneeded parentheses, semicolons, brackets and whatever .. Yeah, of course 'hello world' works in any language, but somehow it feels stupidly exhausting and is no fun to code in all the modern things :(
This is amazing! I had N.N. on a Shareware disk as a kid, and rediscovered it while streaming last year. It stood out as memorable amongst many other hundreds of games. In many ways, it was genuinely more entertaining and engaging. Thank you so much for sharing this.
Wow, so few people must have played that game. I am genuinely surprised you found it too!
Wow. You didn't just take it a step forward. You took a full leap forward. Thanks for sharing!
Great story and presentation. The remastered hall effect in the DOS-version looked really cool! The Godot version turned out looking great as well I think. Well done :)
I’ve very much enjoyed my time in Godot. I’m currently working on a proper game in it.
@@eviltrout Cool! That sounds interesting. I've only used Unity, but Godot seems good.
I know a similar game that's definitely coded by a teenager, never completed, and spread around on shareware CD-ROMs... It was called Incunabula: The Untold Secrets (or "incun"). I believe it was also coded in QBASIC. I'd love to see an even slightly more finished version of it but I'm sure it's a pipe dream.
Nice to reconnect with an old friend as well.
We’re grabbing lunch soon!
Thank you for taking the time to make this video! I really enjoy videos like this where developers reflect on old projects and share it with great storytelling approach :)
Thanks! I’ll definitely be making more in the future but it takes some time.
This was really enjoyable! BBS-era shareware culture is an interesting topic, and you've gotta love the vibe of reverse-engineering long-obsolete file formats. I also hadn't heard about Mark Ferrari's artworks before. They're mind-blowing, and the fact their motion is created entirely using palette swaps just takes it to another level. Great stuff!
I feel this so much. Have recently done bugfixes to games I created over 25 years ago, and am doing some DOS development as a DOS port of a new point and click adventure that is being developed for Windows , Mac OS and Linux. Glad to see I'm not the only one interested in doing that kind of stuff and playing around with their own old source code too. Loved your write-up... er... video-up.
You lost me at remastering. The progress looked absolutely amazing up to that point, I would love to see an updated DOS version.
Same with me. 😢. In comparison, the engines feel like cheating 😅
Brings me back. I wish I still had my old projects and games from back then. Borland Turbo C was amazing.
Great video!
Looks like the algorithm likes your content! I'd love to see more of this type of thing from you, you come across with a sincerity and matter-of-fact approach that makes your narrative very compelling.
This was such a beautiful video.
Presevation isn't always about preserving something. You can lock a book inside a lead vault and it will probably never be destroyed; but it will also never be read or inspire anyone.
So to see you talk about your own work and build an interesting narrative around it (in the form of remaking it) was really interesting. I can't imagine how strange some of this must have been for you.
I like this format of showing older software and showing the problems we have keeping them relevant (like your last video). Keep it up.
Thanks for your compliments. I do think it’s a shame that most software people write is left behind, especially when they put so much hard work into it.
I also started my journey in QBasic, I remember making my own paint program, and I called it Squimp, and the files it saved were basically .sqm which was just the raw color data. These files were used in an RPG I made where you changed screens when you walked past the edge of the screen. Fun times. Now I dilly-dally in C and I just can't get that far into my games, because I have no ideas :D
This was an interesting video! I enjoyed the topic, delivery, and format. I'm going to check out the rest of your channel. Thanks for making this kind of content!
Very cool to go back to a game you made years ago and improving it with some modern tools as well as using "retro" tools like Borland C++. Great video, thanks for posting!
I can see why Borland C++ was so popular. It works very well. It’s a shame that software like that eventually dies out so I was glad I was able to take it for a spin.
Really nice video. I‘m afraid to say: I like your old version a lot more than the upgraded/remastered one. Sorry, but I like that old style you chose back in the days.
That DOS scene is truly incredible. Like holy shit wow. You should have a crack at writing a modern renderer, you'd enjoy it.
I started my programming journey by playing around with QBasic as a kid too. I only did some really basic "Choose your own adventure" type games and then attempted a text parser which I never really completed. In those days I was mostly interested in Sierra adventure games so that's what I tried to emulate. What I really like about this throwback is the contrast between coding then and now. We've gone from having to handle the mechanics directly to having pre-built engines that can do that for us. The progress that has been achieved over those few decades that personal computing has existed is truly mind-blowing.
On one hand it’s fun to have so much control over the hardware - but I know as a kid I only learned that because I had to. It would have been much more fun to just prototype my ideas with an engine if I could.
Those Mark Ferarri demos are amazing.
He is incredible. Search UA-cam for his GDC talk and be ready to have your mind blown :)
I’m not a programmer but I really enjoyed this video. You provided an excellent commentary too. Thanks.
I've found that when I look at my old source code from that time, it's actually quite legible, mostly being a list of things which need to happen in order with some GOTOs for flow. When I try to fix it I end up using shorter and more confusing fancy syntax, needless byte/bit packing and silly optimizations, splitting code into "proper functions" which often just means time wasted scrolling around in the IDE to find the bits which did uh, what again? Setting up variable scopes and arguments/references can be a time waster too. Often I end up so entangled that I can't finish the thing I did with relative ease as child.
Sounds like you've become overburdened with SMART PEOPLE things injected into your system, instead of Doing things to do things however things get done - unconcerned about SMART.
I wish you a recovery brutha. 🤡🌡
@@JB-mm5ff Rustifying unchanging parts of the codebase sounds fine, while also bearing humourous symbollism, but it's probably gonna spread like a cancer to New Features isn't it.. 🤡
Would have loved to see the original Twitter user’s reaction to the remastered versions!
I tried contacting them while I was working on the video but unfortunately received no reply. There was a recording of them playing and reacting to the game that I would have loved to include but it's now missing.
Some of my earliest memories are of my dad helping me with code for a text adventure in QBasic. I never finished any of my many experiments in QBasic but I look back those memories fondly. I probably wouldn't be programming today if not for that memory. Anyway, this video hit some major nostalgia notes for me. Good work!
If you still have copies of that stuff it’s a great time to revisit it!
The intro to this video really made me wish I had saved all my games I coded as a child. I DID upload them to YOYO games when it was still up because I used Game Maker Studios as my game engine. They shut down the website and with that most of the games on it. It's still nice to look back on memories and now that I am coding again, I can use those memories and lessons for my new games. Still, I really wish I had them. Thank you for this video! I was looking up level design and this one popped up... glad I clicked on it man. Cheers!
I’ve lost so much code to time and it really bothers me. I now do everything I can to backup all my creative efforts to multiple places.
I subscribed to your channel and this is the first video I looked at. Advice on 'Taking it further' and 'Sharing the artefacts far and wide' was what sold your content, in my opinion. Great style and delivery. Respect and love from Istanbul.
Wow great video, I love these kind of videos. They way you explain all is phenomenal.
I very much like this direction. It's a great balance between entertaining and educational.
Thank you for the video! That was a very interesting experience.
I'm sure we all have a bunch of creative stuff we did when younger. It is kind of beautiful how we don't think about how successful or feasible it even is, we just do it because we want to. In my case, it was terrible, and I wouldn't even dream of sharing it with other people, let alone remake it! This was really inspiring. Like your older self is telling your younger self: "You don't have the technical knowledge to do this yet, but you will, keep at it!". I totally understand why it stayed somewhere in your mind for the past 5 years :')
Definitely subscribing. I don't know where this channel is going, but I want to see it!
Also, that Mark Ferrari art is INCREDIBLE. Like... DAMN!
I really enjoy the demoscene content and explanation of how it’s done, personally. I’d love to see more of that if it’s something you’d like to do.
Funnest .VOC file ripping source is from the demo version of Syndicate: American Revolt. Want a satisfying shotgun sound, or an entire air-strike? Yep, that's your file base for it :)
Ahh, the good old days. Learnt a tiny bit of Turbo Pascal and used the SPX library that could play that kind of stuff back then. *Through a PC speaker, without a soundcard!*. I thought that was amazing at the time. I had no idea how they did that in Megalomania and Space Hulk and found out how, kinda. I was vaguely thinking there could be a win95 .DLL written for it, so no-one would ever have to pay for a soundcard, ever again! How wrong I was....
Port $42 is your byte-schmazzer for that :)
Weirdly enough, you could probably use an entire thread or core for that kind of stuff, to modularize it away from main gameplay threads, and never have that interrupt interfere with game or graphics cycles. As well as scare the beejesus out of people without speakers or headphones plugged in, that their computer can do more than "beep" out of that little/huge box they paid for.
It is funny how sound used to take so much CPU and these days any built in sound card will handle anything you throw at it without breaking a sweat.
It’s totally worth learning new skills cause then you get excited and confident to create
Great video!
Unreal was great. Anyone who's vaguely interested in old school demoscene should watch Unreal 2 by Future Crew. Even more seminal.
Another great video, really enjoy your stuff :) I have no idea what you are talking about most of the time, but, as with Digital Foundry, I simply enjoy listening to whatever you are talking about. And sometimes I actually learn something :p
Some people say I provide too little detail! It’s a balancing act. I hope that non developers can enjoy the videos even if they don’t understand every little thing. I’ll probably experiment with some videos that are much less technical, too, to see how they go over.
Thoroughly enjoyed the video 🙌 To imagine you guys made all that at only 13 years old.
Something tells me this was not your final project, so will be eagerly awaiting another episode ✨
This was the worst of two games Martin and I released as shareware. If the response to this one is good I might dig into the other one in the future.
Weird, I found this game on mobygames looking for a different game, was curious about it, searched it on YT for gameplay, found nothing, clicked on something else and it recommended this vid. Neat.
This video made me smile... I have fond memories of creating sprite and animation creation programs in QBasic and figuring out how to pallete cycle.
There’s a whole generation of us who found programming this way.
Everything you say in this video is so true. Thank you very much for sharing this story with us. This really resonated with me and who knows where this will take me. I'm aware that you don't know me, but thank you so, so much. I owe you. I wish you all the best for the future and have a nice day.
What a very nice comment. I really appreciate it.
Oh wow I remember playing Nocturnal Nightmares from a shareware CD! I wish I had held on to all the Quickbasic games I made when I was a kid. Great video!
It blows my mind that people remember it :)
I'm currently doing something similar with one of my first games I ever developed. It was my "Dream game" and I didn't have the skills or knowledge to make a good game at the time. It's a buggy, difficult, incomplete mess of a prototype that I gave up on when I realized I didn't have the ability to make it good yet. It was impressive for one of my first games, but my new remake of the game so far is a world of a difference.
It's incredible to see just how much modern tools have made creating games so much more accessible. I look at assembly or quickbasic and my palms start sweating. I'm going to stick to C# lol. But wow, I love learning about the creative solutions that came from the hardware and memory restrictions of the time.
What a cool video!
I don’t think I could reach for assembly or quick basic if I hadn’t had childhood experience with them :) keep at it and get that dream game out!
Interesting story, thanks for sharing
That reminds me of a tale of my own, I've played old dos game called Tactical Battle Simulator as a kid, shareware
As an adult I've played it again a few years ago (found the full version to download), found a bug in it! and tried finding the guy who made it on social media just to talk about it, but never found the guy.
Man, you're such a nice guy!
You are good at telling things and your topics are really interesting
I think you can make videos *you* *want* and more people will find and like it. Not sure if it is a good advise, but I'm happy UA-cam recommended me your channel.
Also I'm a bit obsessed by all kinds of preserving and remastering games, music, movies, photos, etc. and fixing old code. Personally I've only restored a few old family photos so far but perhaps it still helps to respect such things. Not sure about this paragraph but I'll leave it🌚
What a journey! Great video.
Good creative vibes from this video, commenting for algo.
Nice work! It's interesting to see not just how far you've come, but how far the tools have come, too.
That is awesome. It's a good story and you tell it well. Thanks for sharing & greetings from Germany.
U made it simple man ur subscribers are well deserved
In the BBS time I used to sell shareware on floppies on flea markets, because as you said not everyone was using BBS. I created a catalog with screenshots and info and people could just pick a game or software. The screenshots were all black and white and I printed these with a dot matrix printer xD
Personally I also created some stuff back then, not games but some tools and spread them around as shareware. Your game looks really cool. Didn't know you could make such graphical stuff in qbasic.
How profitable was it to sell shareware? I always wondered if people were making money doing it or if it was mostly a hobby?
@@eviltrout I was like 13y old or so, it was profitable enough for me xD peanuts but it was fun. Later in the 2000s I started my own shareware websites in Germany like Tucows. I was making good money with ads and affiliate - if someone bought a license I got a cut. Passive income! Good old times.
I made some dumb shareware games in the 90s as well, and several years ago got a phone call out of the blue from someone who sounded like they were very young trying to get a copy of the full version. I had to give them the bad news that I’d lost the source code years ago and had no way to provide it to them. Because of this experience I thought about remaking the game in a more modern environment, and maybe I’ll finally do that now.
That was a fun watch. What made it great is how the whole video tells a story that is quite inspirational.
I have dabbled a bit with creating games in Java and opengl in the past, maybe I should check out Godot, it seems fun to use.
palette cycling also used in Corridor 7, Descent, Quiver games. =)
Definitely a different and very cool take on following up on a fun little coincidence. Very nice!
What a great video. I love the detail you went into.
So cool to see the chain of events that led to you remastering your own game.
So happy you're uploading videos again. Thank you :)
Inspiring video! I'm currently reworking my old quickbasic games, so I can relate!
Upload them to GitHub if you can so they are archived forever :)
@@eviltrout they'll be on itch
I really wish I had kept my games I made in QBasic when I was 12-18. They were super cool, but long gone now.
I probably made 120 games over those years. All lost when my mom threw out our 486 computer after I moved out. :-(
It’s brutal isn’t it? Martin really helped me out but I also have much much more code over the years that I haven’t kept and is now gone. The best thing you can do is release stuff. Or better yet, open source it.
Inspiring! The only game I've ever finished was a qbasic game from when I was 11. I want to do it now ha.
Do it!
That was quite some improvement to the original game there, I always wanted to be able to code but never really gotten into it, I am good at using Dos with old computers and stuff but I am more a technical and mechanical person with focus on building circuits and Tube amplifiers and repairing stuff or making music and many other things, But coding feels like a hassle for me. But when I make the things I do I always want to push it a little bit further to widen my perspective and I always done this. keep upp the good work
I think when you’re a hobbyist there’s nothing wrong with not finishing as long as you have fun along the way.
Cool story and I really like the improvements that you made to the "remastered" version of the game. Sorry to hear that it seemed that not a lot of people bought the version from 30 years before so this might explain why you did not do a full version of the game.
I did have some experience programming on my Atari 800Xl with the built in basic program but my games were mostly text based games since I was not aware of how to implement graphic routines.
In retrospect I think if I focused on text games I would have got more done. Something like ZZT would have been great in q basic.
Nice. I never could’ve done that at 13. And it’s interesting to see how you did the remake.
You could have. You start at 9 and you can accomplish more by 13 :D
I have looked at old code I wrote 10 or more years ago and said to myself, "What the heck was I thinking? What does this section do? Why did I do it this convoluted way?" But of course we all learn new and better ways to do things which is why our style changes over time. Since then I definitely include a lot of comments in the code to explain what each section does so that when I come back to it later I don't have to spend a great amount of time trying to understand how it works.
If you’re not embarrassed by your old code then you’re not improving fast enough!
@@eviltrout I haven't done any programming for years, so I wanted to challenge myself. Recently I made the pledge to myself that I would write an assembly game for the C64. Looking forward to accomplishing something. One great thing about doing that nowadays is that there are WAY better tools for programming on the C64 (and other retro systems - even the Atari 2600 has modern programming tools!)
very neat - you have a nice style of presenting - no suggestion just keep it going.
QB64 is awesome, Quickbasic will live forever
Amazing content! Would love to see that new DOS version of the corridor in the actual game.
Get 1.99 registration for an unfinished 20yr old game. Writes AAA title to fulfill the promise. :) Got me to ring the notification bell. Loved it.
Qbasic! I use to peruse websites checking out all sorts of games. Had fun with it trying to make an Angband style RPG, and a ship shooter. Never got too far, but my coding buddy at the time continued down that path and codes professionally now. I wonder if he has any of our old source code for our broken programs... Anyway, great video! What a fun trip down memory lane.
This was a great video! Loved watching it.
Amazing times, like other commenters, I wish I had known how to market and release games at the time, early 90's. I watch GDC videos about those times and so many guys were just like me, a guy in a bedroom making games, and here I thought I had to be some giant Microsoft or something. I remember hearing the story of the Prince of Persia author, literally just one guy making a game. Or Sid Meier's Pirates was written originally in BASIC... it just seemed so impossible as kids but looking back I knew I always had it in me if I had just pushed a little harder.
I actually had N.N. on some demo disk here in Slovenia haha :D
Great video thanks for the upload
that was enjoyable.
Reminds me of my own misspent youth - except I never thought to release anything.
thanks for posting the background music, i'm stoked that it's not on band camp EDIT: ah snap. i wish epic hadn't bought band camp
It’s from a former co worker of mine and I love it. It’s on Spotify, too.
That intros cool,, a digital artifact of 1s and 0s haha, near eternal artifacts too
This is awesome, but a tip - Always have an option to turn off screen shake ❤
Loved this, thank you!
Oh man.. voc files! I completely forgot about those also! Wow that brings me back hah.
Also, have you considered using Open Watcom? This is a modern open source compiler that supports dos. Perhaps the optimizer in this compiler is good enough to not require assembly for full screen redraws (maybe).
13:27 When adding this to a game, keep accessability in mind however. A game like this would make me sick quite quickly. I always have to turn off view bobbing or any kind of camera shakes.
This channel is gonna go to the moon man, wishing you all the best.
Thanks! The last video did well but they’re always slow going at first so I never know :)
That's just amazing!
The first gameplay I saw did not look bad at all
Interesting video
Wait, an alpha of Doom leaked a year before its release? I didn't realize it leaked that early. Also wow, your mobygames mentions ForumWarz... I used to play that tons
Im trying to remaster the legend of kyrandia series. Struggling to extract all the graphics. Gave up a while ago
This looks like video-games you find in movies 🤣
That was a great vid!
The scrolling corridor in DOS version doesn't feel perspective correct and it's bugging me out. Think about it, nearest tiles should take up a larger space horizontally than further away ones. I imagine there's a way to render out an index texture out of Blender or something?
I'm pretty certain my perspective calculation was wrong. If I were releasing an actual game and not just a programming experiment I'd do more work researching how to build the tables :)
Ha! This is awesome!
Did you send Martin a copy of the remastered and upgraded DOS versions of your game? I'm sure he'd appreciate it.
I sent him a link to the video when it was finished, and it has links to the entire thing on Github :)
Incredible! XD love the content as always!
You should have sent it to that twitch streamer as the full version of your shareware. ;)
I tried reaching out during production but sadly couldn’t make contact.
Hi, I need that shirt, where did you get it? (Moved to the Sonoran Desert a few years ago.) Also, nice game etc. ;)
It’s one of my favourites: shop.kinwamonster.com/en-ca/collections/short-sleeves/products/button-up-cactus
Awesome.
So who's going to make "Brutal Nocturnal Nightmares" ?
What programming language would you recommend for starting making this kind of game or 2d sidescroller today? I guess it's a good idea to aim for it being for smartphones rather than on a PC?
I'd use a game engine like Unity or Godot.
What a great story. Love it
Do you have the feeling your mission on Earth is now complete ?
Best shirt ever
It’s my favorite
This was interesting. Never played NN, but had tons of shareware cds.
I’m more amazed at the commenters who told me they did play it! I thought nobody did.
Tell me you're gay without saying you're gay
This guy: wears clothes
Hi Trout. I like the music and your calm and friendly presentation. But I found the intro with the fish very annoying.
A couple people have said the same. In my next video (virtual pc) I lowered the volume and I hope that helps.