So it appears we’ve now gone full circle, the app coding phenomenon for the smart phones and tablets now perfectly mimics what happened 30 years ago
I guess in 2013, we are at the 90’s point in the gaming world. The crossover point between hobbyist/small studios to the mega game studios. I couldn’t help but notice Rare advertising for a 2D artist for Windows 8 apps. With tablets and mobiles being open, sexy and cost effective, kids are starting to return to developing again. Plus UK schools are, once more, being mandated to teach programming.
This project was somewhat stumbled into. In 2010, Microsoft were keen for their developers to start filling their empty app store for Windows Phone 7, so some months prior to the release, Microsoft gave their developers’ access to the Phone SDK and asked the devs to knock apps out in their spare time. Being first into the store would have some advantages I thought, so I took a look.
I wanted some graphics to play with while I was sussing out how XNA did stuff and, too lazy to create my own Jet Pac sprites, I used ZXSpin GFX sprite ripper, but that was too slow. So I reversed engineered Jet Pac and extracted the sprites. I started on the remake of Jet Pac using XNA. When I got to the stage of looking to implement the artificial intelligence of the aliens, I decided to see how the Stampers did it. I pretty much ended up reverse engineering the entire game.
It was here that I changed tack. A decision I would rue later.
Inspired by RetroSpec’s remake of Knight Lore (screen shot above) the initial plan was to do remakes of the entire set of Ultimate Play The Game games, to the quality of RetroSpecs Knight Lore. Given it took four years for the Knight Lore remake to come to fruition, I was perhaps somewhat naïve. Writing an emulator would perhaps take the same time as one game but that emulator would be able to run all 12 games. If I took the long route I wouldn’t have an issue with needing permission to publish however if I took the emulator route I would need permission, decision… decision….
I have a cunning plan
The cunning plan was to build the emulator for the Windows Phone 7 device, get all the “Ultimate Play The Game” games working on it, knock out a simple UI and present it to it Microsoft and ask permission to use their IP, how hard could that be?!
