THE MAKING OF: SPACE TAXITHE MAKING OF: SPACE TAXI
after I said, ‘I had one I wanted to get published.’ I
heard, ‘Wait, wait!’ I pulled the phone back to my
ear and she said, ‘We don’t have any, but we’d love
to have some.’ I went in as a 17-year old kid to the
office, showed the game and drove home to my
grandmother’s. By the time I got back, they had
called and said, ‘Can you come back in, we have
a contract for you.’ MUSE added music by Silas
Warner and published Rescue Squad.
In autumn 1983, John started studying at
the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and
began work on Space Taxi. What inspired him? “I
didn’t really play a ton of games,” admits John.
“Definitely Lunar Lander and Asteroids. Just
writing the whole physics engine, once I had the
engine that simulated gravity and thrusts it was
really just creativity at that point. Most of the levels
were different inspirations and ideas that came to
me. I got to the point where I was writing a level a
day. I worked pretty intensely on it during winter
break, so in six weeks I wrote the bulk of it and
then refined it throughout the spring of 1984.
“I built the sprite editor and the character
editor, fairly simple, it let you click the pixels on
and off to build something”, John continues. “I
took the character set and redefined maybe like
32 of them to be little blocks or angles so I could
build different shapes.” The ideas for the levels
flowed from one another as John started building
them. “The parameters for each level were all
done in code. I created what I called a module
file. There were certain memory positions that
were the thrust, the gravity coefficient (horizontal
or vertical), and then any code that happened in
the game loop. So, in the Shooting Stars level,
the loop would randomly decide where a new
star was going to start, and each time it looped
around it would move the star a little bit. Each
module had some of the parameters of the level
but also a bit of the code needed for that level.”
Several levels used animated characters, from
the growing beanstalk to moving platforms and
energy barriers. “Part of the challenge and fun of
writing the game was using the essentially limited
capabilities of the machine,” John points out.
The C64’s sprites were vital to Space Taxi. “You
could create an object and move it around, and
detect collisions. There was hardware support for
that, and that was kinda innovative at that moment
in time. Obviously the taxi was always a sprite.
Some of the animation I tried to do in characters
so I didn’t mess up my sprites. Anything where
I had to detect, the sprites could detect colour
collisions with the background. With the stars
falling, or the snowflakes falling, you will notice
when one of them leaves the screen then another
one starts.” It is also a very colourful game. “I’m
not an artist,” John says. “I did everything myself.
I made all the sprites, all the characters, so I think
what I lacked in drawing ability I made up in colour
and creativity.”
One creative aspect was the speech, with
passengers saying, ‘Hey, taxi!’ and asking for a
destination. John created it all himself. “I went
to Radio Shack, bought some components and
built a little prototype circuit board, soldering DEVELOPER:
Muse Software
PUBLISHER:
In-house
RELEASED:
19 8 4
PLATFORM:
COMMODORE 64
GENRE:
AdventureIN THE
KNOW» [C6 4] Level 7, Puzzler: “Each switch does dif ferent doors, so you get all dif ferent combinations,” says John.