Ship Wars is an arcade-style game finished in 2007 and made with Game Maker 6. For me, this was the portal into the world of programming.
The game itself has always been in a work in progress kind of state since 2005 and worked as my implementation platform, my proof-of-concept scene of things I learnt.
This software is over a decade old and was made for Windows XP.
You will probably need to let Windows install some additional Windows addons during the first run.
Download Here (Mirror)
Bonus: Game Executable – No Installer (Mirror)
The Story Behind this Game…
When I was in 7th grade in the year of 2005, I came to hear about a software in which you could make your own games. That software was Game Maker.
With no internet service at home, I had to ask my parent to ask one of their acquaintance to download and burn this software onto a CD-R for me. USB flash-drives was not a thing back then and the software was too large to store on the more convenient and commonly available floppy disk. CD burners were not a common commodity to come by, even though most PC:s were CD-ROM equipped.
It all began with experimenting, first with the resources of the then prominent and popular Game Maker Community forum to learn how different Game Maker concepts work.
The resources available gave me an insight on how to use multimedia in the game too, but I clearly remember to prefer self-designed graphics, and self acquired sounds, mostly from different kinds of CD:s from PC and Playstation One games, but also sound files I had scavenged from some of my parents’ old course-book CD:s.
Most graphics for menus, texts, bullets, bubbles and so on, I made myself – in Windows’ built-in Paint. I also aquired my basic skills in more advanced image-editing software when, after curious “research” – a lot of trial-and-error really – I discovered a way to create animated GIF images using Adobe ImageReady, a companion software for Adobe Photoshop back then.
The artsy Main Meny background is the result of tens of hours of experimenting with Adobe Photoshop’s different tools. Reflecting over the result today, I get the impression I had a thing for the smudge tool…
The in-game background, and all the ships was the result of two heavily edited images I googled and saved on a floppy disc at my friend’s computer however.
The game was always a Work In Progress kind of thing, where I added new in-game, and outside-of-game features along my learning journey. It had a couple of breaks along the way, and it was first when I discovered a tool to make your own installer that I decided to address some bugs, update some copy-right marks, create an executable icon and finalize and “release” the game, not that I ever published it back then. I mostly spread that to some friends and my siblings had our shared home PC to play this on.
That was in the end of 2007, when I was 15 years old. Some late tweaks/bug-fixes where made a couple of months after this though!
Enjoy!