Game Challenge

Lately a friend and I have been playing a few rounds of the game Worms after work. The urge to play the game came after reading an article in Wireframe magazine issue #44. It mentions that Worms is now 25 years old! Off! Time flys.

I first met my friend Dave in high school, at 12 or 13 years of age. Dave, who was a local nerd like me, bonded over computer games. After a few weeks of chatting about what games we liked playing. He invited me over to his house to play some games.

I had a PC at the time and I was playing FPS games like Doom and Duke Nukem. Dave had a PS1, with Final Fantasy, Armored Core, Red Alert and Worms. I never played worms before that point. I do remember having a lot of fun and finding out you could get it for the PC.

A few weeks later I managed to get a copy of worms. I didn't have any money as a teen so i’m not 100% sure where my copy came from. I think it was a dodgy copy from the only kid in school with a CD writer. I remember getting X-Wing from him too on a weird, gold,  CDR.

So yeah, Worms has  a bit of nostalgia as I'm still paying it with the same dude 20 years later, well, Worms W.M.D.

The Wireframe article mentioned that worms W.M.D still use the same tools from all those years ago. I wondered how worms generated it maps, so I went off on a coding adventure which will be another post on the blog.

While playing Worms Dave and I chat over discord, smack for the most part. We both live a long way from where we grew up, and have busy lives, so it’s nice to catch up and play something fun and chill. We ended up talking about games we would have liked to make back when we were at University. We both studied computing with games programming. Dave the year above, and in the more technical class. I was a year behind as I took extra classes for a year trying to scrape a passing grade for Uni. I barely made it.  

One game, called Liero, looked a lot like worms. It's a real-time and fast paced 2D deathmatch style game with single pixel Amiga style artwork. Dave tried to make it once before but never got far before Uni work side tracked him. I talked about wanting to create a turn based dungeon crawler, like Hired Gun and Orcs and Elves.

Dave then mentioned a game called "Boats n Stuff". BnS was a game mode in another game called "Tanks n Stuff". TnS was a game published on a demo disk for the Amiga. After some quick searching I came across a long play of TnS on Youtube.  "That’s so easy to make  I could make that in an afternoon, no worries", I said. Thus the idea and challenge was born.

I’ll post some updates from time to time here but I want to experiment with Patreon so I will be making a daily dev diary on my progress. You can follow along here.