A Short History of 1990s Operating Systems
Like many of you, I grew up in the 16-bit era of operating systems. Back then, there were a lot of wildly different options and architectures for making and playing games. Most of the games I played were shareware games and demos, because I couldn't afford new retail games.
I played Chip's Challenge in Windows 3.11 at home, went to school where I'd play Lunatic Fringe and Bolo on a Mac LC running Macintosh System 7 in the computer lab. Lunch hours were spent in the industrial education shop where an old Mac Classic let me goof around with building HyperCard toys. Sometimes I'd beg the Information Processing teacher to let me use his Thinkpad running OS/2 Warp 4 so I could play Sim Ant and Sim Farm.
On weekends, I visited my friend's house who ran GeoWorks Ensemble and goofed around with its Tetris clone. At the university I visited on occasion, one of the labs had NeXT computers running NeXTStep which had an incredible UI and development environment. I'd use the campus lab computers to download ZZT levels that other kids had made.
All of these operating systems and architectures had a few things in common in the early 90s:
* Compressed palettes: from 1-bit monochrome on a Macintosh SE, often 16 colours, and sometimes 256 colours.
* High-res displays: 640x480, 800x600 and 1024x768 were the most common resolutions.
* Simple, pick-up-and-play games like Rodent's Revenge, SkiFree! and Indiana Jones and His Desktop Adventures.
* Drag'n'drop integrated software development environments like HyperCard, Microsoft Visual Basic, Borland Delphi, Macromedia Director, and Klik'n'Play.
* Customizable interfaces that let you recolour window titlebars, or even re-design the windows completely.
These constraints made game development fun and simple for the average computer user. You didn't have to be an assembly language coder to make something straightforward, and sharing your game meant just e-mailing a .EXE file to someone else.
If you've tried to build something in Godot or Unity, you know how frustrating these IDEs are for beginners. They're built around 3D engines, and making simple 2D games is like pulling teeth. On the other hand, completely visual IDEs like Scratch are a misery to work with due to their inflexible design. Fantasy consoles are like PICO-8 and TIC-80 are fantastic, but they're really geared towards Game Boy Color-sized experiences.
We need a middle-ground for making hi-res 2D stuff again. An IDE that's as easy to use as Visual Basic, that lets you drag'n'drop window elements and game objects with ease. An IDE that doesn't require watching 25 hours of crappy Youtube coding tutorials to render a hello world scene. We had all of this in the mid-90s, and we forgot how much user interfaces mattered for the average kid who just wanted to goof around and make stuff. Something as easy as HyperCard, but as robust as Visual Basic.
Let's Make Shareware AgainEXiGY rolls up the all of the above experiences into a single package: make games the way they were made in the mid-90s, by dragging and dropping objects into a window, programming some behaviour into those objects, and clicking the Run button. It's like ZZT with tile graphics instead of ASCII.
Want to send your little game to some friends? Click the Gift button to package all of the files up, and send your friend the .XGY file.
EXiGY is about making it fun to create games again. The
Features page gives you an idea of what kinds of games you can build with it soon.
When Can I Start Goofing Around With It?The IDE will have a closed pre-pre-pre-alpha (pre!) test in early 2025. Stay tuned to the
Devlog for updates on the test. Don't worry - you'll have a chance to play around with it!
