Hello, to the future! And now, my contentful first post. These won’t be public for a while, so if you are reading this, it’s because you scrolled back in time.

A normal person writing a game, here in the year 2015, would get a nice framework & IDE, like Unity, and get to work. I read others’ dev blogs and they say things like, “Wow, wasted 3 weeks on a game concept before I decided it wasn’t that interesting.”

Not me. I fire up Xcode and start typing C++ code talking to OpenGL. Why? Indeed. The shortest answer is, because I like writing code. Also, 3 weeks to me is inconsequential. I’ve been assembling my libraries for close to six months now. And they are not bad.

Also, I know exactly what the game concept will be, and have 100% confidence in its viability. This is somewhat mitigated by the fact that I don’t care if, ultimately, anyone else likes it.

And also, having not written any video games in 30 years — literally, a lifetime ago — I was curious how it’s done. I wanted to truly feel the shaders, the collision testing, the lists of millions of triangles. All that.

Also, if you’re reading this, it’s because I’ve chosen to make it public. Hello, to the future!

Perhaps the most oddly suitable opening to this blog will be a translation from a Swedish computer magazine in 1984:

When you load up Ankh for the first time, it is mostly a big mystery. After ten minutes in this peculiar world you will probably go back to the game instructions and note once again that it (indeed) is mostly a big mystery. The ones who do not give up right there and then will be stuck in “The Metareal World of Ankh” for many weeks.

The object is to discover and explore 64 rooms using your craft (The Mindprobe). You can shoot or poke at different objects and if you do right, a door to an adjacent room might open. In this type of game a key usually opens a door, a treasure chest gives points etc. but that is not the case in Ankh. There are plenty of objects to pick up, but their function and usage is to be discovered by yourself. What will you do with a pink triangle? Why does a star twinkle when you touch the small green square? It is mostly very abstract but it gets more and more logical the further in the game you get. Most rooms have their very own problem for you to solve and you will constantly find new perplexing items. When (if) you have found all rooms, there are still strange (inexplicable?) phenomena to wonder at. And listen carefully: you will only find the solutions to some problems by means of hearing.

If my description of Ankh seems abstract and incomprehensible, it is not my fault. That is one half of the game’s charm. The other half will fit you like a glove if you like tricky brainteasers.

Many thanks to Fabio Cataldo and Adam Grpsve for this translation.