★ GAMES ★ AUTEURS DE JEUX ★ KEITH WILSON|Amstrad Action) ★ |
| Keith A. Wilson | Keith Wilson |
Is Keith Wilson of lowland Scotland one of those rising software stars? Two AA Rave games are his work on the Amstrad. Still at school, he's one of the programmers behind (and in front of!) Vidi, Rombo's video digitizer. Keith's partner Arnold Just over five years ago I managed to scrape up enough money to purchase my very first computer, a ZX81. Little did I guess that now I would be writing number-one computer games like Yie Ar Kung-Fu and Green Beret If there had been lots of stunning games around for the ZX81 (as there are now for other computers) I don't think 1 would have ever got round to writing my own programs. But 5 years ago there wasn't much else to do on a home computer, so I systematically worked my way through the Basic manual (meaning I started somewhere in the middle and read the whole thing backwards) and began developing my very own games. Most of them consisted of a horizontally moving boat/spacecraft/aeroplane firing depthcharges/rockets/bombs at a horizontally moving submarine/alien/bird and they were all very simple, but they involved a lot of techniques which are standard in most games. Creating stuff in Basic is a good way to learn how to program. But after a while I began to get fed up with the lack of speed and decided to enter the mystic lands of assembly code. These days everybody seems to have anti-assembly complexes. Machine-code itself isn't really that complicated, the knack lies in deciding exactly what you're trying to do and how you're going to go about it. Anyway, after a while I found that I didn't seem to be getting anywhere with assembly. I packed it in, thinking that I had still a lot to learn. As it turned out, I knew most of it already and realized that machine-coding wasn't so bad after all! The next great step in computing history was the ZX Spectrum - ‘the world's best personal computer for under £500' the ads said. I eventually bought one and reapplied myself to machine-code. I also began to get ideas about making some money out of my hobby. I decided to write an adventure using The Quill Entitled The Lost Orb, it involved a crystal orb (surprisingly enough) which you had to find. Once the game was written, I decided to have a go at selling it. Eventually I sold quite a few. The price was low, but it made me some money and I was reasonably happy. I began trying out all kinds of ideas in machine-code and I had plans for developing arcade games and other adventures. But then there were rumours about a new colour computer with an amazing specification, and I began to wonder if it would flood the market. The Arnold turned out to be all it was promised (and on time - unlike the ZX81 or Spectrum!) and yet again I changed computers. Things really started happening when I met a guy called George Wright. We had similar ideas about writing software. We got together and began using a Commodore 64 with White Lightning, which was fast and much more fun than assembly. Working together turned out to be very successful and we began developing a game, which for various reasons never quite was. Incidentally, one of my great programming secrets is to drink lots and lots of tea which was (and still is) regularly supplied by George's wife, Linda. It was around this time that I became seriously involved in Amstrad programming. Marcus Sharp (of Rombo Productions) was desperately looking for an Amstrad programmer to help him finish off a game conversion. The game was later abandoned, but I soon found myself working again, this time for Imagine Software. My task was to convert the combat game Yie Ar Kung-Fu from the original arcade version by Konami onto the humble Arnold. I reckoned that I could manage it and with the help of a colleague, I did. Yie Ar became a very famous game and it opened up a whole new avenue of opportunities for me. Imagine was keen for me to stay. The firm managed to persuade me to do another arcade conversion, Green Beret. I was getting a bit stuck for hours in the day by this time and I was very surprised (and pleased) when George offered to do the graphics for Beret You can judge the results for yourself. From start to finish, the tape version of Green Beret took about three months to write. The graphics arrangement worked splendidly. We often brought the two computers together to work on - it was great. I wrote code and George designed graphics. We argued, drank some more tea and fixed the problems. I then took the graphics and slotted them into the program while George worked on more graphics. It was hectic, but we often got more done on those weekends than we sometimes did in entire weeks. One advantage of writing your own game is that if an idea doesn't work, you can just scrap it. You can't do that on a conversion; you have to work round it in some way. Take Green Berets scrolling for example. The arcade machine has continuous scrolling but it also has a 68000 processor with plenty of memory and hardware. The CPCs just can't handle moving that amount of screen by software alone. And if you used a hardware scroll, the score information at the top and the weapons at the bottom have to be software-scrolled back to their correct position - not to mention the way the hardware scroll messes up the screen addressing! Hence, we had to use the ‘burst' scrolling technique, which looked very jerky to me at the time but I just had to accept it. At least it gives you a bit of a rest from the hectic gameplay! I am now working on an original game called Moonshadow with George. It is a large multi-screen game with a combination of fantasy and space elements, to be released on the Ocean label for the Amstrad, Commodore and Spectrum. I won't give too much away just now - you'll just have to wait until it's released next year. George and I recently set up a company called Vega Graphics to handle Moonshadow and anything else which comes our way. We are also looking for a local Spectrum programmer of professional quality - anyone in the Lothian area who is interested please get in touch: (0506) 41 ****. The future? Well, I'm working on digitizer software for Rombo's Vidi, and I've got plans for some serious software - assemblers, art packages etc - as well as a few more games. I also hope that Vega Graphics could develop into a form which would make it possible for us to market some of our own products, an area which we feel is better handled at the moment by the experts such as Ocean or Imagine. But who knows ... ? I have found that I enjoy computer work. When I finish my education (I'm presently doing O-levels at Deans Community High School) I think that Vega would be an ideal full-time occupation. Oh, I almost forgot to mention, I am 1111 years old - in binary, of course.
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