Dan Gale
Thanks to his brother
Where
do I start? I guess it was back in early 1991-1992 that I was exposed to VGA Planets for
the first time. My brother showed it to me and we started up an e-mail game. I liked it
enough that I got a few of my friends involved and it for the most part we proceeded along
happily playing the game.
Campaign Editor for VGA Planets
Then one day on a phone call my friend Mark said, "I wish we could set up the game
before it starts and then everyone could have an empire to start with." Well that put
the wheels in motion and the first Campaign Editor appeared in 1994. The first version was
pretty primitive, key based menus and not very "visual". Version 2 came out not
too long after that and provided a visual interface although it was still a DOS based
program.
VGAP 3.5 Add-Ons
After the Campaign Editor was out for a while I got a phone call from Dave Killingsworth.
He was exploring a project for Tim that was to be a CD release with VGAP and a bunch of
the 3rd party products on it. I didn't think about it much and was pleasantly surprised to
be asked to part of the CD. The CD project never saw the light of day but a while after
that I got another phone call from Dave. He was looking for a programmer to work with him
on some addons for the new version of VGAP that was coming out, Version 3.5. Again, I was
happy to be considered and agreed to work with Dave on them. I never figured they would
amount to much and I offered to do the work for free but Dave would not hear of it (lucky
for me).
At this time Tim was in the process of switching to Visual Basic 3.0 and I made the
move too. I did the add-ons in Visual Basic for DOS while Version 3 of the Campaign Editor
moved to Visual Basic 3.0 for Windows. It made my work a lot easier as the first two
versions were done in C and easily 65% of the code was low level stuff for the interface.
JumpGate was the first addon we did. It took a few months of work to get the concept
working and that became the foundation for the rest of the addons. We must have had
between 10 and 15 different ideas on the drawing board and many reached the complete
design point. One of the more ambitious ones was Market Forces; it was going to add a huge
new economy engine to the game. In the end only four more became part of the Dan &
Dave Addons collection. Between working the full time job, family life, and answering the
ton of email that started showing up I was running out of time to explore those other
ideas. Dave got ahold of Cliff an they breathed life into a couple more addons.
The
Freebies
During this time we put out a few freebies. Tim asked us to put together a player
"helper" utility so that is where TacCom (Tactical Command) came from. It never
got out of beta but folks where downloading it anyway. After that was HostCon (Host
Control) which was an attempt at putting together an package for aspiring game hosts. It
was designed to help make the task of hosting games easier and have automated hosting. It
looks fairly primitive compared to what is available today :-) I also did a quickie addon
called Neutral Zone at the request of a couple of the "regulars" from the IRC
planets channel. It was released with full source code too. You can still find these
freebies at http://www.solarflaregames.com/dnd/index2.htm.
Campaign Editor for VGA Planets 3.5
When Visual Basic 5.0 came out I decided to upgrade the campaign editor to 32 bit
programming and put in as many bells and whistles that made sense.
Ground Forces
As Tim started working on VGAP 4.0 he was encouraging Dave and I to do a complete game.
Seemed like a good idea at the time so we jumped right into it. Somewhere along the way I
got involved in a game called Half-Life. I was introduced to the "death-match"
game and I thought it was "the goods". Periodically we played Blitz Games on the
IRC (anyone not familiar with this - it is where a bunch of you get together and play as
many turns as fast as you can for a few hours). I started thinking that it would be fun if
we could do something like a death-match game in VGAP.
RAW!
And so, the biggest addon, RAW! (Rapid Action Warfare), was born. We stopped working on
Ground Forces and started the design work. Tim even joined in and we had a blast putting
it together. Dave came out for a visit and we cranked out most of the core engine while he
was here. Ralph Hart did most of the artwork without which, we could never have finished
the project. Tim liked it enough that he put in some hot-link buttons in VGAP 3.5! It was
a real kick and all our testing was done online in IRC games with turns never taking more
than 10 minutes and averaging 3-5 minutes. When we got done, we had something that we
thought was a lot of fun but it turned out that most of the VGAP community did not care
for it - we ended up making a game for about 50 people.
Ground Forces Again
We returned to Ground Forces and got to the point where we had 3/4 of the game done and we
started second guessing ourselves. It went through three major design overhauls and each
time we kept coming back to the key question: would it be fun to play? As I write this I
realize that the negative response to RAW! really put a shadow over Ground Forces. Perhaps
unfairly so but - that's the way the cookie crumbles.
Life Continues
As I look back, all in all, those days of the "flying circus" were some of the
best. Today I do programming work for Worldcom. I haven't played VGAP in some time now and
much of my spare time finds me out on one of the many lakes near my home doing a little
fishing. Dave is the sole proprietor of the addons now. The Campaign Editor is no longer
for sale and I've given it to Tim to do with as he sees fit (*). I still like to talk up
new ideas and VGAP is always somewhere near the conversation.
One of the coolest things about the VGAP work was seeing orders come in from Spain,
Argentina, Japan, an aircraft carrier somewhere in the pacific, and many other places
around the globe. So if you have an idea, my advise is go for it - how'd you like to be
the one opening the letter from Spain or Argentina or Japan or ..........................?
(*) Tim is now distributing the Campaign Editor for free with each registered
version of Winplan
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