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The eternal codersInterface
“With the fast turnaround back then, we had
enough trouble just handling the development
side,” says Austin, who by 1987 had formed
Creative Reality with two friends, David Dew and
Neil Dodwell. “I was always happy to leave the
publishing side of things to the companies that
hired us.”FROM 8-BIT TO MOBILE
Initially, at least, the mobile gaming industry
was as exciting and free as those early days of
8-bit development. “On mobile, to me, it’s very
much like the eighties,” says Ball, who’s created
several retro-style games for iOS and Android.
“With one or two-person teams creating
something that’s original and not based on a
licence.” Middleton, who worked on just about
every platform going, recalls: “Working with
mobile used to be great back when there was
only one iPhone, and no-one had ever heard
of Android.”
Twelve years later, the constant stream of
models and versions of each mobile phone
bring their own quirks and problems. “It’d be
easy if you only had to write for the state-of-the-
art £1249 iPhone XS Max,” continues Middleton,
“but you must also
consider the £15
Vodafone Smart first 7.”
Austin echoes
Middleton’s lament,
describing an “ever-
changing platform” where a game developer’s
builds can be instantly broken by the latest
update – and then there’s “the sheer amount
of different devices out there,” Austin adds,
“all with varying operating systems, screen sizes,
and capabilities.”
Alternatively, both Ball and Passfield voice a
differing concern with modern mobile games.
Says Ball: “The main issue is marketing – with so
many new releases, it’s virtually impossible to get
noticed. I’m surprised anyone makes any money
at all.” Passfield agrees. “It’s a very crowded
market, so you have to do something special to
stand out.”IT’S NOT ALL BAD NEWS
Games can be marketed directly by the
developer on mobile, which sounds like an
improvement on the fixed distribution chains
of old – but then there’s the sheer number of
competing games to contend with. For fans
of old-school text adventures, this will strike a
chord; by the late eighties, thanks to adventure
creation utilities such as the Professional
Adventure Writer and the Graphic Adventure
Creator, the genre was saturated by efforts from
amateur adventurers. But these utilities were
simply the enablers, and that’s partly what drives
the saturation today.
“The tools for developing games these days
are amazing,” says Passfield. “Unity, Xcode,
Flutter, Corona, Unreal, Buildbox, and Defold are
just a few of the many options to make games,
and most are free.” And, unlike the past, there’s
lots of help at hand. “The amount of resources
in terms of tutorials, videos, books, and blogs
is also incredible. It’s definitely easier to make a
game these days.”
Then there are the
debugging features
available with today’s
tools, as Middleton
notes. “Back then,
there was only limited debugging and no error
handling at all – if your game did something
stupid, it crashed. These days we have the
wonders of structured exception handling
to catch you when you’re stupid, as well as
high-level languages that take away a lot of the
painful base code, and libraries that you used
to have to write before you could do anything
at all.” But of course, there’s even a drawback
to this.TO THE METAL
“I still love assembly and hitting the hardware
directly,” says Ball. “Finding new hardware tricks,CODER PROFILE
JOHN
PASSFIELDFIRST PROGRAMMED ON
Commodore PETSELECTED EXPERIENCE
Gee Whiz! Entertainment,
Krome Studios,
Pandemic Studios,
Red Sprite StudiosGAMES THEN
Chilly Willy
Microbee
Halloween Harry
Microbee
Alien Carnage
PC
Flight of
the Amazon Queen
PC & AmigaGAMES NOW
Save Our Village
iOS, Android
Beetastic
iOS, Android
Brainiversity
iOS
Snappy Word
iOS, Apple Watch“It’s been an honour to have
been part of an industry
pretty much from its birth” Passfield’s iOS game
Save Our Village. The first of Passfield’s two
games for the Microbee
computer – Chilly Willy.