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Version Two - Spiral Island

Spiral Island started out using the the three characters I had in Leviathan: Amy Carter, Marcus Tilden, and Queen Sarissa Croshid. RPG Maker 95 let me have up to 12 characters, so I created some more. I added in my own character, The Anaconda, as one of the playable characters, and began creating the enemy group, a team led by my own character's rival. I borrowed from an earlier event in the Pokemon fanfic I had started this character in, and resurrected my elementary school writer alias, Orion. The rest of the characters were really throwaway characters, with alliterate names from a random name generator, and really were only there for filler.

After discovering that the RPG Maker games were illegal translations, but failing to find anything else good enough to replace it, I decided to learn some updated programming languages from the Commodore BASIC and Pascal that I knew. I began learning C++ and the DirectX API, programming on the Pentium computer that I owned, a gift from a person in my church who had built it for a particular college class and didn't need it anymore. This wasn't an easy task, as the original machine was actually damaged from a part installation and needed a replacement motherboard so it had a working floppy drive controller, and the replacement motherboard had a bad memory controller or integrated video controller (I never actually figured this out) and was constantly crashing or locking up as long as I owned that machine. I could only do coding as long as that machine cooperated, which wasn't often. Eventually after a year or so I got a Pentium 2 that was being sold off by my father's work as they updated their machines, and my problems finally ended in that regard.

As I began developing the story to Spiral Island, I began to take it more seriously. I wanted to go further then just a single game, and do more with it then just an extension of a Pokemon fanfic. I had wanted to actually start a game development company after I graduated, and I decided this game was where I intended to begin. So I trashed almost all of the storyline I had written for it, and began a new storyline, with a new backstory. The original Spiral Island was dead, and the company AnacondaSoftware was started anew, with a new title. The first game in the Spiral Island Trilogy .


Date posted: 30 July, 2008
Tags: anacondasoftware computer programming software spiral_island writing
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