Ambardia - From gamer to developer with no experience.

   Im 41 years old. The reason your seeing "retro" so much now is becouse as you get older you tend to think back upon fond memory's. Think about how popular 80's music is. We love to listen to those sweet sounds of our youth.

    We also learn from our history. Making retro games is a way of going back to the roots of the gaming industry and getting a fresh feel for what made us entranced to play Pong, Pac-Man and Mario Bros. Don't you sometimes yearn for something you enjoyed in your past that is no longer readily available to you now? Gaming is no different. We all want to remember and relive fond memories. Even the fragrance industry is recreating mass amounts of original smelling Channel #5 and such as smell is another way we relive our most memorable experiences.

    I'm excited to see this same trend with games. It means gaming is growing and evolving into something that is more than just a thing we do when were bored or trying to feed our particular kind of OCD. Gaming and developing games has become a culture and an art form used for expression. We now have a new medium to use in our never ending pursuit of expressionism and advancement.

    I rarely admit to friends and family that I am a hobby game developer. But I love to think of my hobby the same way a bunch of happy old guys get together on weekends sometimes in an old garage or shed to build a model train set. They put their hearts into building a world with their hands and imaginations. Today, we can get together with online friends from around the world to do the same thing.
Long live retro!

Day 4

   As time went on and computers hit the amazing speeds of 500 Ghz I began to get into various chats around the internet (Dial up as there was no broad band yet). The very first graphical chat world I was involved with was called "The Palace". It was really cool becouse your avatar was actually a graphic you could use to interact with others with. The Palace had many rooms and places like the library or lounge and places like beaches and stuff. You could walk your little avatar around (smiley faces or uploaded photos) to the various places. One neat place was the bedroom and you and another avatar could enjoy bouncing on a bed together, lol! You could even make what was called a bus and get others to jump on it and travel together to other places as a group.

   The Palace got old pretty soon and I moved on to AOL Chat. At the time you were charged by the hour you spent on AOL and at one time I ran up a $600.00 online bill. I never paid them as a lot of people did not as well and AOL finally created the one month payment system and wiped every ones slate clean (thank god).

   I made a new friend at a bike shop I was working at and he was into computers. He asked if I had heard of the game "DOOM". I had and he helped me get it set up on my computer so that we could network together and play over his network. It took a few days to get it all worked out but finally we were slaughtering our way through endless bloody corridors.

   So DOOM was my "First Online Game Experience".

Day 3  

   So Ambard was established and my journey into fantasy and gaming was well on its way. Over the years I wrote many adventures and read fantasy at night till sleep took me over. My collection of role playing books and accesories grew to fill a whole book shelf. But I still had a fire within me to experience it even more.

   Me and my friends began to play more and more of the new video games that were coming out. One of our favorites was Dragon Slayer. We poured every quarter we could scrounge up to keep those preciuse levels running. At the time there were no personal computers that could run these kind of games from home. So day after day we played various role playing games and spilled our quarters into those magical glowing boxes.

   The day finally came. One of my friends parents got him a personal computer. It was a Commodore 64. There it sat in all its gray platic glory. Its big brown keys just waiting for us to comand it. I remember typing in my first ever line of basic code. It was simple and made my name continuosly run on the screen in an infinate loop. Soon we were pouring over manuals and writing our first text based adventures. Our lives as computer gamers was borne.

Day 2

   So someone out there might be wondering why I am so stuck on the name Ambard. Ambard is the name of my first ever Dungeons & Dragons character. He was a human cleric and I remember the excitment of rolling those marvelouse dice that came in the basic set. I was 14 at the time (26 Years ago!) and had almost no science fiction or fantasy influences at that time.

   I met some new friends in a new neighboorhood we moved to and they were all into D&D and fantasy things. Once they introduced me to it all I was as hooked as a heroine addict. I lived for the next D&D game and started reading Lord of the Rings. My eyes where opening to whole new worlds and dimensions.

   It did not take me long to realize I had a talent for creating. I began to design my own D&D adventures and soon had a whole world graph papered out complete with towns and all manner of mystical areas to explore. I mowed some area lawns and finally bought my first boxed expansion "The World of Grayhawk". I marveled at its brilliant cover art and spent hours gazing at the full color maps now hanging on my walls. Grayhawk soon become the main world me and my friends lived our "alternate" lives in.

   Ambard finally got powerfull enough to purchase his own keep in an area on the Grayhawk map. I spend countless hours designing and redesigning the layout of the keep. This was now my part of the fantasy that I created from my own mind. Years later and to this very day a lot of what I create is still influanced by Ambards keep.

August 20, 2009

Day 1 

OK first off lets get this out of the way. You might be asking yourself, what is Ambardia and why is this noob telling us? Well Ambardia Online is the MMORPG that I created out of the desire to build my own world I could develop and run around in.

   I plan to use this blog to describe how I went from an avid 8+ hour a day gamer to a 10+ hour a day developer. I am going to slowly explain who I am and how the whole concept of my game developed. In the course of this blog you will get to live the life of an old time gamer who remembers the fresh plastic smell of the Pong game comming out of the box to the excitment of running Everquest for the first time on a PC that would actually run it.

   So please remain seated and fasten your seat belt. In the case of a zombie attack remember to use a blunt or sharp object to smash the head and destroy the brain.

Ambard