It's amazing to me how many "firsts" in life you can have, no matter what your age. For example, this is the first blog I've actually ever written. And I'm waaaay older than the average 64digits / Game Maker guy.

And this is the first time I've actually made a game that has a cohesive story, a nice titlescreen, an animated help page, an ending stats page, etc., etc.

I've been writing programs (many of which were games, but not all) for a long time. My first computer was the Vic-20, which had a whopping 4k of free ram that you could use for your programs, and 16 colors. (Which was 15 more colors than most other computers had back then) I made a Donkey-Kong style game that had ladders and barrels to jump over in it's built in programming language, BASIC.

For graphics most games back then used the one built in font set in the computer's rom. You would take the characters outside of A-Z and 0-9 and edit their shape, pixel by pixel. Each character was 12x12 as I recall. Two characters were turned into a little man, swapping between the two for his walk cycle.

You had to save your games on a cassette tape drive, and if you forgot where on the tape counter you put it, then goodbye game, you'd never find it again. When the Commodore 64 came along, what a revolution!

But I guess I'm rambling on into another kind of a blog altogether. Time to get back to work…