Idle Thumbs 269: Robot Russian Roulette

[Necrox]

So awesome with all these KnP posts, thanks everyone ^^ I'll be checking some of those games out for sure

[Jay Tholen]

Sorry about the bump, but yeah, the Klik community was how I got started making games way back in 1999 or so. I still use the newest incarnation of Clickteam's software for my personal projects. I've been collecting games/old website data from those communities and I hope to start a project to document/archive that whole little era of ultra-independent game development. The community was most vibrant from around 1998 until 2003-4ish, and any record of it is being lost slowly as the internet trudges on. 

Some of my faves:

Eternal Daughter by Derek Yu and Jon Perry back in 2002 blew everyone away. David Saulesco's OST was great too:

The Spirit Engine 1 & 2 by Mark Pay were also brilliant:

is currently being made in Clickteam Fusion, and looks amaaazing. Alonso's been working on it for almost a decade.

 

[Problem Machine]

My first experience with modding -- actually, maybe my only experience with modding, since that's never really been a scene I got into -- was with the original Diablo. I used a trainer program solely to back up my characters in case I got my corpse stuck in too nasty a situation to retrieve my items, and eventually started poking around in the character save files it generated to see what I could do. I figured out what each of the byte values represented, and started loading my character out with items that used graphics that were cut from the game but left in the files. I played around with creating new weapons this way, such as a two-handed shield that did bonus damage, but unfortunately the stats of unique items were baked into the game code so I couldn't generate new uniques without them reverting to the originals when the character was next loaded. I tried to edit the game files themselves to create one of my custom uniques, but couldn't get it to work. It was a pretty fun and interesting experiment while it lasted though, and looking back on it now I think I learned a lot about what goes into making a game from playing with those files.