davidn | Four million words about me

Over the last few weeks, I've been doing an interview with Tisnart from the Clickteam boards, as part of an ongoing series where he talks to people about their involvement in the community and their current projects.

I had first thought that there would be a few questions back and forth and that would be the end of it, but things got rather carried away and I would now estimate that it contains everything that I've ever done in my entire life. If you're interested in finding out about how I got to being where I am in terms of game-related projects, and details of the other various things that are currently weighing on my conscience, the interview will explain more than you ever wanted to know. Most of it is about the stuff I do with Clickteam, but my music and ZZT get honourable mentions.

It also concludes with a notably bad photograph, a property I seem to manage to lend to all my photos simply by being in them.

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From:

kibet.livejournal.com

I skipped some of the interview as it is getting close to my bedtime and some of it went a bit over my head not being a gamer, but what I did read I enjoyed. I may jump back to it as I want to read about a couple of games that I thought sounded like it would be fun to play. I think one was running free.

From:

davidn

That's the beauty of iOS (and earlier, Flash, as I remember you getting quite into Couronne when you were in your office in the Purdie Building) - they're games that can be liked by even people who don't think they play games :) Now, while they don't have anywhere near the universal appeal of other media like films and music, everyone seems to be able to talk about them on at least some level.

From:

kibet.livejournal.com

yeah I meant game creator speak. I would say I am a procrastogamer more than a gamer. Ah yes Couronne, I got quite good at that and not touched it since.

I forgot to say, I remember Bad Influence, but did not recognise it by name. My first thing was 'ANDY CRANE!', then sort of remembered the woman with the crazy hair before the memory was complete with the guy who stuck passwords to his head.

I remember AvP getting talked about, and the sonic and knuckles game attachment. Although, from what I can remember, to play mega drive 2 games on the megadrive, you had to have a conversion catridge.

From:

davidn

'Procrastogamer', I like that. There's a word that should enter the lexicon of the Internet - I think we've all done that at one point :) And we were around for the start of the ability to do so, with Couronne, that game where you dynamite a jeep up into the air to pop the elephant/alien balloon things, and that other one where you have to belt a penguin over a distance of miles.

The most distressing thing about my rediscovery of Bad Influence was that Whitney said that the shed-dwelling password-man Nam Rood reminded her of me! I'd forgotten about him sticking passwords to his head as well until I saw him again.

From:

kibet.livejournal.com

He reminded me of Alexei Sayle when I was younger I think. I am sure he used to stick multiple passwords too sometimes.

One of the fun ones I quite liked was Chronotron? It was all about going back in time in order to get enough robots to help you complete the level. Also Primary, which was a recent one was also good. Crypt raider was also a favourite a while back. Oh and of course Boxplode :D

From:

ravenworks.livejournal.com

What does "simple little adventure games on the Commodore 64" constitute? That sounds harder to make than a Klik + Play game!

overhead vines (which are really just invisible platforms that tell Bernard to play a different animation when he's on them).

You clever bastard! (I think I remember you mentioning that in the past, but I still feel the need to mention that I never would have thought of that.)

By the way, I don't know if it'll come as news or not that there are already games that fetch a sequence of user-created levels from a database...

Odd that he didn't realise you were responsible for the music! I guess it's just a given that most MMF games don't have original music? Or just because you use a different name for your bandcamp page... (why is that, anyway?)

"asking friends to suggest games and then playing them blind"

Hahah, it sounds like something more like "my strategy is generally to hold the right button, and switch to the left one when it sounds like my character's been hurt..."

I'm loving how thorough this interview is! These are the sorts of questions I always feel I'm prying when I ask..

I don't know if I've ever actually seen a picture of you before! You always seem to have the camera facing away (or not involved at all) in your videos.. Y'know, for a moment I was about to say "no, wait - I've seen you at halloween!" but now that I've found them, those pictures really aren't much (http://www.clickteam.info/davidn/images/jasofredwig.jpg) help (http://www.clickteam.info/davidn/images/davidhair.jpg)! :P

From:

davidn

When I say "adventure games", I don't mean anything of any programmatic robustness - the kind of adventure games a five-year-old would make. (And now that I say that, I realize that that's not a concept that most people in the world can imagine.) They were basically just lists of PRINT and INPUT statements, allowing you progress if you typed the right actions in the right order.

Looking back at Commodore BASIC now, though, it was a wonder to me how anyone managed to make anything of any complexity at all, with variables with names like ZC$ with no concept of scope, altered from a GOSUB that could come from anywhere, and visual and sound data stored as strings of numbers POKEd into specific bits of memory - the C family makes things make far more sense by comparison!

I'm glad you enjoy my approach to platforms ;) Doing it that way made things far easier than creating an entirely new game element and adding another check to see if the player is below a cling "rope", rather than just letting them land on an invisible variant of the existing platforms. It would have been unwise of me to think that I was the first to think up the idea of a sequence of user-created levels - but which games are you thinking of in particular that do it? I remember there's that marble run HTML5 game...

You can't be called 'DavidN' on a power metal album, even if it is computer-written and sounds like an Amiga! (Although having said that, Edguy are doing surprisingly well.) I think that you're right about the music, that people assume that game writers don't do their own music - in MMF games a few years ago, it was most common for the soundtrack to be made up of MIDIs from VGMusic, although as it's begun to be used for more substantial games these days, that practice is dropping away. Nifflas is another example of an MMF programmer who's primarily known for his music...

And you don't have to be shy, as I think I've answered much more personal questions when talking to you! (Speaking of which, do you see that second-last question about something else that people don't know but might find surprising? You have no idea how tempted I was to put something so outrageous in there that everyone would have dismissed it as a joke.) And when you're used to seeing people as their avatars, particularly characters that are meant to represent them, it's always sort of strange to remember that there are humans behind them - I often forget.

From:

ravenworks.livejournal.com

They were basically just lists of PRINT and INPUT statements, allowing you progress if you typed the right actions in the right order.

Hah! I was writing the same kind of programs at that age, but I never thought of faking a narrative with them :)

It would have been unwise of me to think that I was the first to think up the idea of a sequence of user-created levels - but which games are you thinking of in particular that do it? I remember there's that marble run HTML5 game...

I'm not sure the marble game you mean, but off the top of my head there's Forever Drive for iOS, and (while it does have a 'real' set of levels as its main mode) the "enter the unknown" mode of time fcuk (http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/511754)... I feel like there's another example that's escaping me, though.

You can't be called 'DavidN' on a power metal album, even if it is computer-written and sounds like an Amiga!

Then, now that I think of it - why aren't you Albion everywhere :)

And you don't have to be shy, as I think I've answered much more personal questions when talking to you!

Well, but those are very interesting questions! Sometimes it's the most humdrum ones that are the most educational in terms of getting to know a person, but I never want to wear out my question-asking welcome.

You have no idea how tempted I was to put something so outrageous in there

Believe me, the thought entered in my mind ;)

From:

davidn

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That game has a very... unique and uncomfortable presentation! Not just the old style and usual horror twitchiness - the voice synthesis is one of the strangest I've ever heard, being almost musical but seeming to drop letters out of the English words or change the vowels occasionally, making everything seem slightly... wrong.

The marble run game I was thinking of is <a href="http://marblerun.at/>just called Marble Run</a> - though it's not so much a game as just a construction kit, where the individual pieces combine to form a continuous course. You can click "Auto" to watch the marble fall past multiple users' renditions of various shapes and size of penis.

'DavidN' isn't exactly the most unique of names, but unfortunately, I came up with the name 'Albion' too late to use all over the Internet - and it's not really a name for 'me', so much as the... label for my music. As <user site="livejournal.com" user="kjorteo"> is keen to point out, this didn't solve the uniqueness problem (I went from sharing a last.fm page with one other identaically-named artist to sharing one with about five).

From:

ravenworks.livejournal.com

I think the thing about Time Fcuk's "speech" is just that it has one sound per LETTER, regardless of that letter's intended pronunciation in context. It's an interesting kind of DE-complexifying, that sounds like scrambling when you're used to decoding all those symbols automatically...

From: (Anonymous)

Commodore of z2 here. It's cool that you worked on c64, since it continues to be my hobby. I was looking for My Liver Hurtz on LJ, since I lost his email and wanted to give him a shout for Christmas, when I came across your post. Check out the C64 game I just made if you have the chance! http://sites.google.com/site/malcontentsgames/dunjon-battler

Also I note you have an awesome PoP avatar, so you may be interested in the great port that was recently made for the venerable 64.

From:

davidn

I didn't know you worked with the Commodore - though I suppose the clue has been in the name all this time :) I went back to look at it again quite recently and I was impressed that people still wrote fairly up-to-date IDEs for it, but I was stunned by how... obtuse it all was compared to today, with graphics and music set up by poking strings of numbers into memory, no concept of scope and program flow that could come from anywhere to anywhere else. Given all that - though I never thought I'd be saying this - the assembly for your own game actually looks quite understandable to me, or at least, no worse than Commodore BASIC :) I'll have to put that in my emulator and have a go...

And I'll look at Prince of Persia as well - I did a sort of comparison of all the different versions a hundred years ago, and found that all the 'official' versions tended to have something terribly wrong with them, apart from the SNES one which was a different game. Certainly when I played the NES one, it was a hugely frustrating experience despite knowing the game on the PC inside-out. I'll be interested to see if the fan community could do any better :)

From:

davidn

And when I said 'official' I meant console, without the quote marks. I'm not sure how that could have got there, but I can blame the short amount of time between getting out of bed and writing that comment.