Purpose

I love space and spaceflight. My first book report was a biography of Werner Von Braun, one of the founders of modern spaceflight and NASA. I was addicted to Star Trek in the early 70s, later on Battlestar Galactica, then Star Wars, and so on. I've always wanted to participate in these Universes but understood it was all fantasy. When personal computers made a huge splash in my teenage years became addicted to adventure games. I could never afford a PC but had friends with Commodore 64's and would spend hours sitting around at their house BSing with them and suggesting things for their party of adventurers to do.

When I finally got my own PC the first thing I did was write a Haunted House adventure game in BASIC; initially it had nearly 100 rooms but I discovered the limitations of the hardware and ultimately fleshed-out 30 rooms (plus six outdoor areas). The whole process was a real learning experience and the outcome was incredibly rewarding but I've never programmed a computer game since then.

I graduated from College with a degree in Software Engineering. Between the time I created the Haunted House game and I got my degree I had hundreds of ideas for games. I would put them down on paper, writing them as if they were board games. The idea was that if I could create a board game with rules they and the game play could be easily translated to software. I got this idea while creating my Haunted House game back in the early '80s (yes, I'm that old); at one point while writing the Haunted House game I became stuck with the game mechanics - I found that if I drew a map of the Haunted House and wrote the rules out on paper I could refer back to it easier when writing code. I ended up using chess pieces as the players and monsters and pennies to represent memory. The Tandy MC-10 didn't allow too many pennies ...

So I have this folder full of game ideas. Some are very elaborate and spanning multiple pages, others just a single page with the ideas writing down like a grocery list. I haven't won the lottery but I've also not created a game in nearly three decades. Why not go through the list create something? What have I got to lose? So we finally come to the purpose of this blog;

I'm going to use this blog as a status report on creating my game. I'll also probably post things related to its creation such as theories on solar system formation and such (yes, it's a space game). I've already described the game to a few people and much to my surprise the first thing nearly everyone says is, "You're making Master of Orion?" I've never played the game. Since I've gotten such a universal response from people I've decided to avoid plagiarism I'd continue this 'tradition' and purposefully avoid playing it.

Here we are, day one.