In May 1999 my brother Julius and I wanted to learn
a bit of Cinema 4D, so we invited the son of a mutual friend of our parents.
He offered to introduce us into Cinema 4D. As usual we showed each other
our previous work. Julius and I made our first steps in programming and
presented a blinking oval shape which could fire at other blinking ovals.
This was the point to come into operation for mattin. He rendered a space
ship for another project and he gave it to us, Julius included it into
the game and the game looked a thousand times better. The evening was
a success when we included a second space ship and an explosion. No more
words about learning Cinema 4D.
The project grew slowly but surely and became slower and slower because
we worked with Delphi and Windows API calls. In the meantime Anselm joined
the team and we started to convert the whole project to DirectX and C++
Builder. And here as well we discovered the edge of the used technology.
During this time we started to set up a German webpage for game development
because we just found English ones and the lonely kellerkind.de. This
is how I met Matthias, webmaster of kellerkind.de, who was working on
his own project during this period of time. This encounter was going to
have some vital influence in the future but for now back to the game:
We started over from scratch for a third time using Visual C++ as our
development environment. In September 2000 we completed a test version
of ProjektD and decided to stop further development because we saw our
motivation swooning.
At this time we met MSE (Mainstream Entertainment) for the first time
in real life. They were developing a real time strategy game based on
the stoty of the Tripods. After we cancelled ProjektD we started some
further education and decided to start a new game in 3D. A new sechsta
sinn homepage was born and games-net was rebuild from scratch as well.
We started over with new euphoria but after a really short time we had
to face a by far too huge project for our team. During this time I talked
with Matthias in the German game development chat #gamedev.ger and we
came up with the result to merge sechsta sinn and MSE (Mainstream Entertainment).
Again euphoria started to take control : ). On the same day I asked all
the other team members and they supported our idea.
The next possible meeting was arranged and all necessary subjects were
talked through. We decided to develop the real time strategy game of MSE
in a different scenario with the new name Die Verbotene Welt (The Forbidden
World). We designed a new homepage again. And now all the motivated members
of sechsta sinn and MSE were working together on the new project. It was
my whish to keep the name sechsta sinn.
In the meantime we took part in a #gamedev.ger competition and developed
the game MechWalker within one week. We won the competition with desistance
to the next game : )
Since the contest we met quite a few times and the development on Die
Verbotene Welt (The Forbidden World) had a great process: There is the
final version of our mission editor, the artificial intelligence for the
computer units was improved and new units and buildings were added. We
won our first screenshot contest with Die Verbotene Welt (The Forbidden
World) (45,29% voted for us) on http://www.zfx.info! To be continued
[Jochen]
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