While I was going to school I started a few projects, which I never have finished. Here are the largest ones:
- “FutureTrain”: Because I liked the concept of “Railroad Tycoon” by Sid Meier I decided to develop a clone taking place in the future. But I stopped the project because I could not reach the quality to satisfy me. I realized that my knowledge was insufficient at that time.
- Inspired by press preview of the game “Outpost” I created a similar looking title. At that time it featured wonderful hand-made SVGA graphics motivated by screenshots of the coming “Command & Conquer: Tiberium Dawn“. In the prototype it was possible to scroll the view and to build a small town. There was also a complete animated introduction in SVGA.
I only used “Turbo Pascal” to program it and an painting tool, which was delivered with “SoundBlaster 16 ASP” and could handle 8 Bit graphics. - “EarthDefense” (“EDef”): First I created an introduction animation using “Raytrace 2.0” and programmed software to compress and play these video. I also did a lot of research and drafted much artwork but I never really started to program the game itself. With the time my capabilities raised and I wanted better videos. So I recreated the intro using “Monzoom” (formerly called “Reflections”) and with more spectacular content.
At that time I started a new project, which was only planned to be a two-month-production but the duration increased to four years and took all time from “EarthDefense”.
Up to now I can call it the longest project I ever worked on. At the beginning I attended the eleventh grade of the german grammar school and was seventeen years old.
Initially the game should only use 320×200 VGA graphics with small pre-rendered images but later I advanced it to 640×480 SVGA full screen backgrounds. I also improved the visual appearance of the map from a two-dimensional top-down view with color variation for different height levels to a textured, illuminated and dithered rendering from a bird’s eye view (also called “2.5D”). The game also got an original soundtrack and special sound effects.
Despite all regenerations I managed to get the game finished and published to retail stores in the year 2000, when I was 21 years old. At that moment I was studying computer sciences at the University of Leipzig but I realized that my “real” education has reached the level, which made me ready for a job. And so I discontinued my studies.
The name of the product is “Space in Motion: FutureTrade” (details are coming soon). In the production time I also graduated from school and served my military service in the “Bundeswehr“.