Search 2000 (1999)
Platform: Win16
Language: Borland C++
Graphics: BGI
The first version of Search was purely experimental, and I felt a great success. Now that I had proven to myself that I could create a graphical RPG that would impress my friends, I wanted to raise the stakes.
The year was 1999, and it was clear that the first version of Search was about eight years past it’s marketability. So, Search 2000 became my next big game experiment.
I knew I wanted to break out of the memory and graphics limitations I was facing with Turbo Pascal on my 386. I moved to overcome this by writing the follow up to Search in Turbo C on my new extremely inexpensive Cirix 300Mhz PC.
I made two major user interface modifications. The first was to increase screen resolution. The second was to move from a top-down 2 dimensional world to an isometric “two-and-a-half dimensional” (2D with overlap and transparency) world.
I was still using the Borland Graphics Interface on a 16 bit DOS platform and the increased resolution combined with the overlapping of graphic tiles required that I come up with some unique solutions to a quickly slowing ‘frame-rate’.
At the same time I was also learning quite a bit about modern game writing tools. As a result, it wasn’t long before I realized I was fighting an uphill battle. The smartest move I could have made was to scrap 16 bit and BGI all together and switch to the modern world of Windows 9x and hardware accelerated graphics. So that’s exactly what I did.
Thus, Search 2000 died.
