Stellar 7 Development
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Game Design Document
Game Transcript
Exploring Game Resources
Developer Notes
Damon Slye[1] wrote:I had a technical bent. I was drawn to assembly language, low-level graphics, and 3D algorithms. I think I had a natural intuition about game design, but I did not spend as much time early in my career focusing on those skills.
Stellar 7 is a good example. I decided I wanted to do a game inspired by Battle Zone (hey, I guess that is one game that inspired me come to think of it). A friend saw me playing it in the arcade and asked, 'why don't you make a game like that?'. At first it sounded impossible. Then I started doing research, slowly chipping away at all the tasks that seemed impossible. How to do graphics on the Apple II, how to do fast math on the 6502, and finally the mystery of 3D.
So first I coded 3Space, an engine upon which to build the game, and after that I wrote the game. I wrote the whole game on notebook paper in pure algorithm form. Then I translated it to 6502. Once I typed in the code, I got it working in just a few days. It's a different approach than is used today: write the entire game out on paper, then type it all in, and run it. Nowadays it makes more sense to write single functions and test them by inspection in the debugger, or do unit tests along the way. Of course, Stellar 7 by today's standards is tiny.
