About HMA Games

Early in 2003, I fiddled around with Visual Basic for Applications and Visual Basic 6, two related programming languages. At first I tried to make games way out of my league, such as an early version of Encounter with little success. On April 18, 2003, I was short on time and so decided to make a small game. While it was difficult, I finished the first version of Memory, and Homemade Arcade was born.

hile the original goal was to make ten small puzzle games and put them on a CD and put bigger games like Encounter on a CD by themselves, I soon decided that I should include all games when I made IceSlide, my first game with moving graphics. IceSlide also introduced timers, collision detection, and basic tile structure. The first five Game Pack 1 games took only a day or two, but IceSlide and some other big ones took weeks.

Game Pack 2 followed up with more games that took a lot of time. King of the Sky seemed to fit in better with the Game Pack 1 games because of the graphics style, but it introduced several new things, such as high scores and sound. Jerrit's Quest was revolutionary. It was tile-based, but it used a scrolling engine. the graphics style was completely different. It used some DirectX and tons of new concepts developed for it. Encounter is possibly my favorite accomplishment, because of how it was made. I programmed the graphics, collision detection, and everything beforehand, and in one day I developed an amazing math formula for 2D movement. Once I plugged this in, the game looked beautiful. Rings was made because I liked the Tower of Hanoi game (a piece of board with three poles and rings), and I wanted to see if I could make the computer solve it. Checkers was made entirely for the AI stuff, but I still apologize for making another unnecessary clone for the already overdone game.

Game Pack 2 was halted at this point, as many other things were worked on. Among these were Apatsagwan, which also was groundbreaking for me. It used Xara 3D to create 2D graphics and DirectDraw 7 to create a new, professional look. It involved tons of features, and used lots of new formulas. As well as Apatsagwan, I also worked on developing a screen saver engine that could make it possible for me to make screen savers with most of the technical aspects complete (the only thing they lacked was support for multi-monitors and other operating systems).

When Apatsagwan was mostly done, I started on Screen Saver Pack 1. It took long at first, as I was still finishing the screen saver engine. I managed to finish all ten screen savers in only three weeks, however, thanks to one hectic week at the end of school in 2004 when the latter half of the pack was made.

Next, I worked on Screen Saver Pack 2 alongside finishing up some loose ends on games in Game Pack 2. What I did first, however, was making some extra screen savers too big for Screen Saver Pack 2 that would be sold on Game Pack 2. In Screen Saver Pack 2, I created a screen saver version of IceSlide, only this time I made it with better code. The original version was over 3,000 lines of code, while the screen saver version was about 675 lines of code (more than half of it being levels), which shows the improvement since then.

After much wasted time, I finally got back to Game Pack 2 by making Jewels of Xanadu in only one day. While it didn't break any ground, it was my first game to use the quadratic equation. Next I made Skeet Hunter, which took most of a week. It was made mainly to show progress since Bottle Bust. Then, I moved on to Lost 3D, which was entirely for the 3D engine and progress (the gameplay does not matter). I ran in to many many math problems (which tended to use trig) and revolutionized HMA graphics by using the first 3D engine. AT the same time I started to work on a sequel to IceSlide to show my improvement.

None of the following are complete: Apatsagwan, Gamepack 2 (Lost, IceSlide2), Screen Saver Pack 2 (a whole lot of them), Screen Saver Pack 1 CD Version (debug for widescreen, Rampage) and Dogtato-kun, a side project. The projects took too much time to make and debug, so I have given up on them.

During the summer of 2007, I took interest in becoming more fluent with Java, so during this time I worked on a code library with modules performing functions of geometry, graphics, and mathematics processing. To test these modules, I created a Java version of the game Asteroids. Now, at the beginning of the summer of 2008, I have taken up the task of finishing this game, expanding the code library, and possibly producing other Java games.

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Webmaster: Ian Burnet. Last updated: June 6, 2008.