PRIXON: Time goes by... so slowly?

Damn! The new year has just began and this year I realize that I have something important to celebrate. It's been 10 years since I finished Prixon! I can't believe it has already been that long...

So let me write a little bit about this game and why it is so important for me ^_^ (no boring code stuff this time). Eleven years ago I was finishing my studies and getting ready for university. I still wasn't very clear about what I wanted to do, that's the problem when you have more than one hobby. By that time I was already involved on code stuff, but only in qbasic. I had tried to do something in C++ but those annoying pointers were being a hell for my mind in that time (:D)

I wanted to create videogames since years ago. The closer attemp I did was with click'n play... but that was more like creating a game while playing (I think Microsoft is planning to create something similar for the 360 now to compete against Sony's LBA). Then, exactly 11 years ago, on Christmas my brother brought to home a demo of a new videogames creator enviromment. It was called Div Games Studio. Div for the friends :D

The demos included on the game were really impressed and the language was quite intuitive, even it included a debugger. I was amazed. And I saw a big opportunity to do something big for the first time. After months testing the language and learning it I started a project called Chula GP (the name is also a long story) that would be renamed into Prixon a few days before finishing it.

I was working on Prixon for a little more than a year. Not fully dedicated because that year I had to study a lot for the exams we have to do before going to university. I use a lot of stuff in this game. For the first time I got contact with tiles, mode 7, music, graphic modes, palettes... and also for the first time I got in contact with 3d max (v4, in ms-dos ); yes, the models in the game where modelated in 3D, LOL, those are the worst models I have ever done in my life. Not that I am really proud of the code today, but the thing is that I finished what I wanted. No rewards except some people telling me that they loved it, which was enought.

I think that when I finished Prixon I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I have finally become a games developer. To be honest I don't know how to fell sometimes. This is a hard profession and sometimes you wish you had a bakery or a ranch in the middle of the forest :_) I am sure I am not the only one who fells like this LOL!

When I was about to finish the game I decided to create the official comic. That was very special also. It supposed the return of Cebolleto, Carateca and Topolino. For 3 years I was dedicated to my manga style and those characters were started to be forgotten. Prixon meant the end of my manga style (or should I say Toriyama style? :D) and the return to my old characters.

Guess that I owe a lot to DIV. By the way, last summer a new version of DIV was released called Gemix Studio, fully compatible with the old one without changing any line in the code (you just need to recompile) I decided to give it a try and get a version of Prixon running under Windows. Yes, you can find it here (source code included) but, be nice :P You have to look at this game like it is, the beginning into the games programming of a university starter ;)

Happy 10th anniversary Prixon!

PD: the sound doesn't work fine.