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That's a rather
good question. Guess I should answer it, or not... oh well, here's
some misc. info about me...
I am a 17-year
old student currently studying a math class at St-Romuald's adult
education center. I live in Canada, Québec since what seems
to be forever (well, make that 17 years :p). I'll hopefully follow
a informatics class next year when I'll enter college, which I'm
long awaiting for. Studying at school is a lot more interesting
when you're doing something you enjoy, trust me.
South Park Gaming
has been a little part of my life since 2000, when I've discovered
about SPGames.com, long known site of SPG game maker, Matt Crosta.
I downloaded almost every game on his site and I liked most of them,
so I looked on other sites if there was any other cool games of
the sort. I stumbled on The Hell Hole, where I discovered more games,
and these were more original games, unlike Matt's games which for
the most part, were rip-offs of well-known games. I noticed the
Klik and Play pop-up displaying at the end of each of these games,
so I desperatly started my hunt for this program.
In the late
days of 1999, I was finally feeling lucky. I managed to snatch my
own copy of The Games Factory. I immediately started work on what
was my first game ever, The Slayer. I spent many months working
on it (work on it was very slow, due to my lack of knowledge of
TGF) and the results were pretty pityful. I decided to release the
game anyway, although unfinished, just for people to have a laugh
at it (this wasn't the first game I've released of course, this
came out after many other good releases!). One late night, inspired
by all these South Park Games I was playing lately, I decided to
start my own SP project: Kenny vs. Death. This is undoubtly the
hardest game I've ever created, with so many fiendish obstacles
and one single hit before dying. It was frustrating beyond belief.
This game got tossed aside before of the unfulfilling gameplay and
annoying glitches. It got finished and reworked on later whenever
my TGF skills increased though. In early 2000, I started another
game, but I didn't even settled in for a nickname yet. Don't ask
me why the heck I choose the name "The Junkman", this
was a finger-snapping decision, and somehow the name got stuck.
:) This game was called Cartman Force, and was awfullly familiar
to The Slayer, although that you got to bash enemies in this game,
not red, blue or green balls. :) The game eventually got cancelled
since I was running out of level ideas and the game was too damned
hard.
In March 2000,
I started two brand new South Park projects: Kenny Puzzler and Save
South Park. With all the projects I've started and eventually scrapped,
my knowledge of TGF increased quite a bit, and I was working on
both games in a more serious fashion than before. At the end of
April, I eventually finished Kenny Puzzler, but I had nowhere to
upload it. I was looking for some site where I could put in my stuff,
and the place ended up being a little SPG site called La Resistance,
which was ran by a guy named Dave. Kenny Puzzler got rather good
feedback from a few people, and encouraged by it's "success",
I continued work on Save South Park, and released it weeks later.
Save South Park is my favorite old game, since it was so fun to
make, so fun that I was deceived that the run through was over.
I wanted this game to continue forever...but hey, every good thing
gotta end someday, doesn't it?
The game-making
madness continues, as months later, South Park Taxi Driver (my most
ignored game in SPG) and The Lost Kids demo come out. Just for kicks,
I also made a sequel of my first ever non-SP game, The Slayer 2:
Rage of the Machine. Cartman Force also got restarted for the third
time (the two earlier versions were one-wheeling flops) but this
time, I had ideas to make the game better. Instead of being a The
Slayer hybrid like the first two versions (that gave no chance at
all for CF to be good, isn't it?) the whole CF thing was intended
to be made as a Zombies ate my Neighbors clone with characters and
difficulty levels that would influence gameplay. This was actually
a premiere in SPG, and many people loved the beta of the game because
of it's uniqueness. People would hardly wait for it to be out.
However, it
took the game a hell of a time to get out. By the time the beta
version came out, I wasn't dedicated at working on this game anymore.
It was somehow repetitive, and I wanted to work on fresh new stuff.
I shoved CF aside for a while and I took a break at making games.
I kept on downloading every new SP game coming out, giving feedback
and advice to people in SPG. I was doing some misc. exemples for
friends being stuck on their games, and by one of these exemples,
I accidently started a new game; Planet of the Cartmans. I didn't
wanted to spend too much time of it, I simply intended it as a small,
quick game. However, my short-term project got out of control, and
quickly grew as a game which would got lots of potential if I worked
it on more. I redesigned the engine a bit, adding to the default
CNC engine some tweaks of my own (like having weapons not to interefere
with collisions and stuff). I also played Halloween Kyle by Stanster,
the first SP game with it's entirely original soundtrack, and I
had the idea to do the same with POC. However, I didn't had much
of a musical background. I composed a few MIDIs in the past, but
they were raw and utter suckage. I gave another try, and after a
lot of perseverance, I finally managed to crank out some good tunes.
This
was actually the first midi I was proud of, and I don't care that
it's a pure rip-off of many other songs, I still like it. :)
Time was passing,
the game was going on slowly, I managed to write some other tunes
for Planet of Cartmans, I had a nifty PSR-260 keyboard as a Christmas
present to make the task easier, and so was POC's whereabouts for
about 5 months :) Finally, the whole thing came out in March. POC
is the best game I've made and it showed that all hardships I had
with it payed off at last. With this game out of the way, I restarted
work on CF. I had my hands on Multimedia Fusion by the time POC
was over, and it greatly helped CF in many ways. I got in writing
a whole-new soundtrack for CF, and the job was far easier this time
around, with all the small experience I got in making the 30 songs
used in POC. The game was almost done, but with my former site La
Resistance gone, I had nowhere to upload my game again. So in August
2001, I got around some intense work (not by me, since I got my
friend Jussi to make a layout for my site :p) and got my own webpage
online, devoted to SP and non-SP gaming. The whole game got out
in August 19th 2001, one day before school restarts for me. What
timing!
With Cartman
Force being finished, I totally ran out of game ideas. I never felt
working again on The Lost Kids, and I didn't wanted POC to have
a sequel. So, to make a change, l started a new non-SP game!! This
game was Hallway Deathtrap, a full-fledged non-SP sequel to Kenny
Puzzler. It got out of the door on December 27th, 2001. In the meanwhile,
I finally got into starting a POC sequel despite my lack of a proper
story for it. The game is still in the works and I have no idea
when it'll be out. I've released a demo of it lately which you can
check out.
That's the end
of the story for now...
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