Welcome to Apparition

Apparition is a 3D first person shooter game currently under development. For specifics about features and capabilities, check out the design document. Also, check out the story. But the main purpose of this site is to track the development and progress I make over the next few years. It is also a way for me to communicate and share idease with other people interested in the same topic. Therefore, probably the most important part of this site is the development diary. This is where I'll track my progress, write about what Im doing, where I'm headed, trouble I'm having (and hopefully others can help out with suggestions), or basically anything that goes through my mind.

An apparition is an appearance. This name is significant because Apparition represents my entry into the game development scene. This is something that has interested me for quite some time. I've made some small attempts at game development in the past, but nothing significant. I developed a simple 3D rendering engine (of the Wolfenstien 3D type) during the Summer of 1995. It was a small attempt. It was a 16-bit real mode application developed in Borland C++ 4.5. It ran under display mode 13h. It wasn't nearly fully featured. It only supported solid colored floors and ceilings, no opponents or health or weapons. No doors, or lights, or decorative objects. Basically, it would be more appropriate to call it a maze rather than a game. In that respect, it was complete. You could customize the layout of the maze, including a starting point and an exit point. It featured 3D wall rendering, texture mapping (including animated textures), and a simple form of depth-cued texture shading. The movement engine did collision detection against walls to restrict movement.

All in all, a rather simple project. However, by the time I got as far as I did, I decided I wanted to move on and explore other areas. It was still quite early in programming years. When I started the project, I had only been programming for about 7 or 8 months. I had a lot of other things that interested me. Specifically, I was quite interested in Windows development. So I started to learn Windows programming using the Borland OWL Library. It was very tedious work. Even with the object libraries, it took a lot of code to do even the simplest things. I developed this way long enough to learn that Windows development sucked. Or at least that's what I thought until I picked up a copy of Borland Delphi. That's when I learned it wasn't Windows programming that sucked, just the tools I was using (in all fairness, the tools were good, just more work than I preferred). Delphi was a revolutionary way to develop. Fast design and development, fast executables, very well laid out, flexible, the list goes on and on. I was in heaven.

Since then, I've spent the last 4 years developing windows programs with various versions of Delphi. I've studied many areas of software development, mostly on my own. I've studied user interface design and customization, graphics, networks, databases, artificial intelligence, web applications, etc. Several times, I came back to the topic of game development and studied it a bit more. However, I mostly just did research, got some ideas in my head, and decided I still had a lot of areas I wanted to explore, so I pushed it to the side again and again.

Now, however, I feel I've explored most of what I want to. I feel the time has come to pick up on what has interested me so much for so many years. I have a vision that's been cultivating for several years. Now it's time for an Apparition.