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Archive / BH Projects History
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1981 to 3rd July 1996
Born. Lots of character developing stuff. Then in 1981 my mum
goes half with me on a Commodore Vic 20. I write a terrible roulette
wheel game with lots of flashing colours, but it's still better than
Pool Shark V1.00. Go from a Vic 20 to a BBC Micro to an Amiga 1000,
learning to program all of them,and along the way running Betelgeuse 5,
a mildly successful Bulletin Board system, work as an Amiga journalist.
Sell a bulletin board system for the Amiga.
Get a job with Digigraphic and then Optonica writing amiga software
that's cool... But nobody will ever hear about. Electric Billboard,
Simpatica, and Interplay authoring system. Don't look for them on
google, you'll never find them. They were my best work up until the
later versions of MJS2. Get to meet some cool people like Chris Newcombe
who went on to do the awesome Gunship 2000 on Amiga and Valve's Steam
groundbreaking content delivery system. He's still making buttons on
Steam the same way he did on the Amiga in 1990 you know. :D If I live to
100 I may still never make anything as good as Gunship 2000.
I think my later decision to become a games programmer was directly
influenced by all the lovely chats over the road at the pub with Mr
Newcombe. I had the attitude that games programming wasn't "real
programming", which is of course, silly, and got put straight on that. I
think outside university research, games programming is the peak of the
programming artform. Also working at Digigraphic made me certain I never
wanted a boss again to suck up all the profit from my efforts and
influence the design of products.
Get to go to an Atlanta Amiga devcon, but get made to wear a suit.
We're the only people there in suits. They are still around as ANQ
www.anq.com . Stands for "Answers not Questions". But surely without
questions there can be no answers...
Quit in 1991 after seeing the writing on the wall for Commodore. Back
NeXTStep as the next big thing. Realise I picked the wrong horse in the
race, lots more character building stuff begging for work, the options
for an Amiga/NeXTStep programmer were somewhat limited. Then read about
this awesome new Operating System called "Copland" which will be
NeXTStep for the masses. Intrigued, get into Macintoshes and await
Copland. -
3rd July 1996
- After a great deal of book reading, and expensive hardware
buying, Bonehead Projects is born. The reason why it's called that isn't
terribly nice, let's just say... It's motivational.
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- First release by BH Projects,
your basic Space Invaders built in C++ and Quickdraw. not terribly
good.
1997-1999
Enforced Holiday. Let's just say just when you think nothing else
could possinly go wrong, the sky falls in. - Mac Invaders V1.12 - November 1999
- Funked up version, with
DrawSprocket, direct to screen drawing, and an extra mode. There's an
awesome amount of work that went into producing this game, but it never
did so well, for a number of reasons. Timing is everything. I'm really
proud of Mac Invaders, and I think it's got a small hardcore of about 10
people who like it too. :D
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Ultra Ball V1.00 Beta - November 1999
- Breakout clone, never
got finished. You can still get it working by setting your clock back.
Frightening dayglow graphics. :D Until the later versions of MJS2, the
biggest, most complex thing I've ever built.
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1999-2002 - Unenforced Holiday. Convinced
that it's impossible to make any kind of living out of Shareware or even
programming, I give up and try different things. Bonehead! I run a
failed games web site that gets involved in a pretty sad hoax on
slashdot(Nothing to do with me guv), take lots of Psychology courses,
meet my future wife, and play lots of obscure import video games.
August 2002 Decide to defrost
the company, not out of a desire to make money but just to program for
fun, after, to my complete suprise, my old NeXTstation is now being made
by Apple, uses a PowerPC processor instead of a 68040, and is being
called "Mac OS X", how odd. Get back to writing NeXTStep software. Now
where's Display Postscript gone.... Elite
TNK Mac OS X - October 2002 Mac OS X Port of the cult BBC Micro
classic. Pulled after one of the original authors changed his mind.
Shame. Mah Jong Solitaire V1.00 - January 2003 One tileset, no
sound, no solvable games, 7 layouts. As an afterthought I make it
shareware. Mah Jong Solitaire V1.03 - January 2003 One tileset, odd
sound, 12 layouts, but getting better. Mah Jong Solitaire V1.25 - January 2003 One tileset,
better sound, 17 layouts, random layout generator..
Febuary 2003 Company in profit for the
first time in nearly 7 years. Life is what happens while you're making
other plans baby. Mah Jong Solitaire V1.50 - February 2003 Alternate layer
shadowing, two tilesets.. Burning Monkey Mahjong - March
2003 Work begins. It's monkeylicious!
Mah Jong Solitaire V1.81 - March 2003 Five tilesets, 30
Layouts, Midi Song player, solvable games. German, Italian,and Dutch
translations. Getting good.
Mah Jong Solitaire Classic V1.00 - April 2003 Well, it was
a start.... Mah Jong Solitaire V2.00 - May 2003 Better solvable
games, tooltips, stats, fading tiles, more tilesets, more layouts!
Mah Jong Solitaire Classic V1.25 - May 2003 A bit
better. Pool Shark V1.00 - August 2003 I can explain. :D
I'm glad I wrote this, as I learnt a lot about game physics. I'm glad I
released it, as I found out if people would be interested in more of the
same. But... Sometimes you have an awesome development time, the 5 weeks
the initial version of Phoenix Ball took to write was one of those, and
sometimes... Not so good. A new version is being worked on, V1.80. as
BareBones would say, it doesn't suck. Mah Jong Solitaire 1 V2.25 - December 2003 Rather
nice very nearly final version of Mah Jong Solitaire 1.
Mah Jong Solitaire 2 V1.01 - March 2004 Last Quartz
version of Mah Jong Solitaire. Has a nasty high scores bug so maybe you
really don't want this. Mah Jong Solitaire 2 V1.36c - April 2004 First 3D version
of Mah Jong Solitaire. Frankly I love it to bits but it only runs well
on G4s and G5s, and seems to give the punters sea sickness. :D So the
sales dropped like a stone after this version. :( Billed as "The
first, the one, the only, 3D Mah Jong Solitiare for Macintosh".
Still is as of writing. Mah Jong Solitaire 2 V1.50d - May 2004 The better, more
refined version of MJS2. Fixed all the problems the previous version
had, and it ran on as many machines as MJS1 did. Spent a good long time
trying to get it to work on a 1999 original iBook, and it does! As long
as you like purple backgrounds that is. :D Phoenix Ball V1.01 - June 2004 Our big new Breakout game,
Phoenix Ball. The kids seem to like it.
Mah Jong Solitaire 2 V1.80b - July 2004 Funkified
version.
Mah Jong Solitaire 2 V2.00 - January 2005 Last version of MJS2 free for MJS1 owners.
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