In the spring of 2005 I ran an Indianapolis Game Development meetup called Indy Game Dev. It had one other member. We decided we’d make our own computer game.
We met at his parent’s house in Fishers where he lived. His family computer was in his parent’s bedroom. I was still working at Old National, 2nd shift, down by the Indianapolis Airport, so it was always late at night when we met.
The game was a turn-based game that worked similarly to how Shadowgate worked. It started you off in a room with a couple of options. The scenes were post-modern, urban decayed scenes with relatively little to no characters.
We mapped out the first level in a rudimentary drawing. It was a simple layout with a couple of different options. The same game could have been played easily without graphics in a ‘Interactive Fiction’-type game.
I had just graduated from Indiana University in Indianapolis the year before where I had taken Visual Basic.NET, Javascript, VRML, and HTML classes. In one of my classes I had made several browser-based games. I felt pretty confident.
Right around this same time, Meetup.com decided to start charging for running a meetup. I understood, but it was a little more than I wanted to take on financially at the moment so I turned the meetup over to the other guy and left.
I learned just enough about game design and 3D engines to discover I didn’t really want to design my own game. I guess I wanted to design a game, but really only wanted to know how it was done. Now I know.