Primordial Soup

[knucracker]

Knuckle Cracker was founded in 2009... but as you might imagine there were things going on before the founding.  Creeper world work was done many months leading up to the founding, but there was work that predates that as well.

The first game I wrote was for the C64 and was a turn based tactical strategy game.  It used some fancy hardware tricks and took hours and hours to play.  It made for some impressive looking screens (C64 wise) but alas, has been lost to 'entropic' hands of history.

The earliest record I have for anything I actually published was a tee-tiny little game called "Silo".  It was released for the HP48sx calculator.  See screenshot below for the readme and an image.  You can still find this game floating around in HP48 archives (source code included).

The next two games I published back to back and were written in java.... Now I don't mean modern day java... I mean they were developed in java 1 and published under java 1.1 back in 1997.  The two games were called "Cosmosis" and "Space Estate".  Cosmosis was more of a learning exercise and was a really horrible game.  It did have a neat AI that would play the game very well against you.... so good that the only thing I ever really liked doing was starting two AI's and letting them fight each other.  Watching the battle was more entertaining that playing the game.

Space Estate was more successful and meant to be an actual game.  It was hosted online and all told had over a million downloads.  This was a pretty big deal back in 1997.  It was essentially a free game (beg ware) and there wasn't the same ad economy there is today, so earnings from Space Estate were effectively $0.  But it was a labor of love, and I enjoyed playing the game with friends.  Screen shots for Cosmosis and Space Estate are attached below.

That didn't end the things I developed, but I didn't publish again till ChopRaider in 2008.  That started the publishing events of the last 4 years and I don't see an end in sight...

[Echo51]

I did imagine you as having done programming in general for a while, but did certainly not think you'd have used the C64 aswell :)

A single question through, why did you pick flash over others(java for one)?

[knucracker]

Flash won out purely for marketing reasons.  I conjectured that producing a flash game and releasing it across the flash portals would be a way to produce advertising for the indie games that I wanted to create.  ChopRaider was a test of that strategy and showed me that I could drive substantial traffic to a site with flash games.  The idea that people would buy a game when they visited that site... well that was a leap of faith.  I wouldn't learn the results of that until after Creeper World was published.

[lich98]

The idea that people would buy a game when they visited that site... well that was a leap of faith.  I wouldn't learn the results of that until after Creeper World was published.

I'm glad you took that risk, I sure do love this game.

[miquelfire]

I'm just waiting on CS2:A so I can unleash this game on more people.

[MadMag]

Fun to read and see :)

[Cavemaniac]

Thanks for taking the time to share this with us.

I do like to understand the origins and reasons behind actions and events.

That and I'm really nosey.

;)

[UpperKEES]

Nice to see your love for physics, space and planets already being reflected in your early games!