The story of one game

I remember standing in the yard in 2002 (perhaps even the end of 2001, who now remembers). Then we started to do this game. Already had some achievements. I must say that these developments could not pogatsa some beautiful picture of elegance, grace and even uniqueness. Everything in these practices nice chips. At the time I did them brother. But to show a white light was still very early and not very good. She was still cheese and anything except mechanics could not boast, except with bugs. I have done it at the time, single and had only acquaintances and friends, which she definitely liked. Let's face it, friends are always all "like" what you are doing. Not everyone is ready to lay out the truth of what is called "head" and say that everything is terrible.

In the old days many were obsessed with Fallout and his Amateur DIY. Did (or rather more tried than done) fashion. Several forums with this orientation of the monitor and me. There wound up znakostva and I got in a team of Digital enthusiasts Geckos. Me some time "allocated" artist Weilard'and that we have improved the game. On my part this required not so much to add a couple of screens, but to change the schedule. And the game is ready.

Here, by the way, so she looked after these simple operations:


Lines Tactics, 2001

In game development I was still very green and incredibly impressed with the final result. However, Weilard to stop did not want and offered the game to expand, to add, to make beautiful. I would say that he proposed to make such a simple, casual game something incredible, epic. Of course at that time. Then a casual game with a style and panache did not.

These games have always looked something like this:


Screenshot from the game Arcade Lines. A slightly more recent than ours.

No sooner said than done. He wrote a design document made an insane amount of graphics and 3D models (insane for such a small game).

The game we did almost 2 years. Then something cutting, tinkering with something, struggling with laziness. Most of my programming. However, the game did all and it looks to this day. As in my opinion, just gorgeous.

"The pull to do something more or less correctly (caused a complete chaos in the company where I worked) led to the development of own games, in the evenings after a hard work. But the love of rust and the game Fallout determined the style of" — Weilard.

Weilard since then, instilled in me a kind of perfectionism in game development, as he worked out every detail in their pictures. Well, what is there to complain about? Except for the fact that all typed in upper case? No, because it is an imitation of some strange apparatus, and similar equipment often do. A fault can be to duplicate the texture on the left block of buttons. See for yourself:



The first game was written on an old version of Delphi and used the framework DelphiX. In General he arranged us almost all, in addition to the absence of translucency (which was compensated by software) and that used DirectDraw. The latter was strongly neglected and thrown out by Microsoft, which complicated the running the game on a new OS.

Later her had to rewrite in something newer. For this I took the PowerDraw 2.42, which was already used by Direct3d and allowed to use transparency and all the other pleasures of life. Had to rewrite, not least because of our free games have a publisher who wants to give money and release the game only in English and with their logo at startup. So there is a slightly trimmed version of the game, but the network has not got it because the publisher at the last moment decided to withdraw for unknown reasons from the game's release and payment of the fee.
Since the source code of the game gathering dust on my drive. While the game itself was walking on the network is slowly dying, so as to run on win7/8 and never could.



Alas, the restriction on size due to the Internet speeds of the time were not allowed to add 2-3 of the audio track. Although I wanted to do it. But we do not regret it places on graphics and even a small, modest animations.

In the game afford even fooled around a little bit and composed a few dozen different issues when exiting games.

And we spared no effort and made a whole section in the rules of the game. Detailed description, jokes and animated images of figures that need to be put in the game.




How it is now painful to look at the text layout in the old version. To align text and to discharge it will be another point in remastering. Necessarily, where without it!



What is the result? Game me to bury categorically do not want, so I decided to make it remastered. In the framework of remastering will:
the

the
• Support Windows 7 / 8 / 10
the
• Transfer to a new engine quad-engine
the
• Improved special effects
the
• Support for widescreen monitors
the
• Achievements

I must say that I would with great pleasure have added to the game and music, where she was stripped 12 years ago. Who knows, maybe by the time major change will be tightened, and Weilard and slightly renewed graphics.

Why did I paint the whole story, show screenshots and videos of the process? Yes, everything is simple. This game was my first completed serious game. It spent a lot of effort and it turned out great. Now I wish that it still remained so, but was available to people. In this connection I discovered a page on Steam Greenlight to vote to release a remastered version on Steam. Free, no ads, microtransactions, or any other nuances. To give pleasure to all fans poke “color lines” for free. And all you need to do this at the moment is to get missing a few thousand votes.



PS: and finally I want to give a link to the very old version.

Download version 2003, the year (5.9 Mb)

Alas, but it works only on the old OS and not as good as I would like. In win7/8 you can start it by putting in the settings of the shortcut to run in compatibility mode with WindowsXP. Here it is:



Thank you for your attention!

Article based on information from habrahabr.ru