My name is Allen and I came up with the idea for Asteroid Invaders. I am a gamer going back to the early eighties. The first game I ever played was pong and the first Arcade game I played was Space Invaders. For me playing games was fun not just because of the challenging of achieving a high score and seeing how far I could get in a game but because gaming allowed my imagination to run free. I thought things that weren’t possible in real life were possible in games. For me anything was possible in a game like travelling through time and space to explore new worlds and to take on limitless challenges.
I saved my paper route money and bought an Atari 2600 (which at that time were very expensive). When personal computers came out I saved and bought an Atari 400 because of the better quality of games and graphics. (Note: I really wanted an Atari 800 but couldn’t afford it ). It was when I purchased the Atari 400 that I began messing around with Basic programming language to try to build my own games. But basic was a slow language and the games I could build were very basic for a lack of a better word and the more elements you added the slower the game would get so that was not a solution for my desire to build games. The only solution I saw was to learn assembly language . Unfortunately there were not very many tutorials at that time to help me learn how to program in assembly and if you have ever tried to program in assembly language you know how difficult it is. Assembly makes C++ look like a walk in the park. At that point I was in high school and other responsibilities began to happen and I threw in the towel on my dream of programming my own games.
Fast forward nearly 35 years later. I never stopped playing video games and I never lost my dream to make my own games and to start my own gaming company and with the advent of all these great game engines like Unity I saw the possibility of achieving the goal that I wasn’t able to back 35 years earlier. With my 50th birthday rapidly approaching I thought now or never and I put together some of my savings and started on my first Indie game which I called Asteroid Invaders.
In my next post I will share why I chose Asteroid Invaders and also start explaining some of the challenges we have faced in the creation of our game.