The Definitive History of Backwood Realm SystemsTimeline:19981996
| 1997 | 1998
|
"The year of the
Realm" 1998 saw the demise of the Backwood
Realm BBS. My installation of Wildcat! 5 crashed out sometime in this
period, and the BBS was no more. I installed Wildcat! 4.12 Multiline 10,
but lost interest rather quickly. However, the death of the BBS by no
means hindered Backwood Realm Systems as a whole. My programming skills
continued to improve, and, inspired by my pastor at the time, John McGaha,
I wrote my first BIG software release. I thought it would be a good thing
to write a bible quizzing program, so I came up with the name BibleSMART
and ran with it! The only annoying and obviously amateur thing: you have
to have the caps lock on to play it! After BibleSMART's May release, I
decided that it was time for a new version of Chatterbox. I started on it,
and then never finished it. This was destined to happen again and again. I
have found a copy of it to post pictures of it. Do enjoy! Next, as my memory recalls, I
invented a DOS-based screen saver to save the life of the monitors on my
classic IBM Personal System/2 386 machines. I called it "Yet Another
Screen Saver", and it had a little config program that allowed you to
put a little line of text at the bottom of the screen that changed color.
Pretty spiffy. Around this time period, I also
wrote the "DOS Color Key", which printed out a little screen
that showed all sixteen possible DOS graphics colors in text mode and
their refrence number. I'll claim it and the YASS Config program as my
very first utilities. Now we've reached the point of
November. Around 11/8/98, I was sitting at my old 386 PS/2 in my bedroom
with QBASIC open, just seeing what I could program. A month earlier I had
discovered how to make it spit out random numbers between 1-80 and 1-22
for Yet Another Screen Saver, so it could print it's little astricks in
random spots on the monitor. Realizing the power this kind of code has, I
opened up the "Operation Redneck" code from the year before, and
knew what it would take to make it functional. Since the idea of that game
didn't appeal to me, I began to design a new idea. I wanted an amusing
game that mostly only my friends would understand. I decided I was gonna
write a game about the community I lived in, which is called Buddha. It
was the last time I got a title screen done first for a game for anytime
afterwards. As a matter of fact, the
long-standing BWRS logo that you see in the top frame of the page came
from the fact that I was trying to convert the logo I had used in
BibleSMART into something to use for another game. Instead, I came up with
that, and it's stuck ever since. I began coding "Livin' In
Buddha" throughout the rest of November and most of December '98, and
I had a semi-functional Beta version (w/player data system, Abel's
arsenal, and Main Menu intact) ready by New Years' Eve. Little did I know what I was on
to... |
Page created 1/28/2003 |