What games first come to mind when you think of gaming? Maybe you think of Mario or Minecraft. Maybe you think of a shooting game like Fortnite, Overwatch, or an older game like Halo or Battlefront. Some people may think of the classics like Tetris or Pac Man. These are the most popular games of all time, but the gaming sphere has changed dramatically over the decades. Gaming is now not just for gamers, with now having countless genres and styles, there really is something for everyone. Not just platformers and shooters, there are sandbox games, horror games, action adventure, MMORPG, choose your own adventure, text adventure, strategy, puzzle. The list goes on and on and on, and each genera has its classics, it's trailblazers, and a lot of them are made by what we call now as indie developers - those who are not working for large developer companies like EA or Epic Games.

Back in the day games were not very accessible. You needed to go to an arcade or have gaming console, or your family needed to be rich enough to have a personal computer with floppy disks. That wasn't too common, and as technology advanced and computers became more common, people started making games for PC. Myst was one of the very first "killer apps" for the CD-ROM computers, and it was released at the perfect time. This was the best-selling PC game of all time for nearly a decade, selling over 6 million copies, and proving that games are not confined to the styles and themes that are found in arcades and on consoles, and proving that video game development can gain incredible popularity and Hollywood levels of financial success. But what is Myst? What made it so successful?

3D gaming didn't exist in the late 80's, or not in the way we see it today with Mario Kart and others. Myst was released in 1993 and truly was a trailblazer in the 3D space and proved what is possible, and more importantly what is possible on a PC rather than needing a specialised computer built into a console. Nintendo was already developing 3D games of their own, starting with Starfox also in 1993 on the SNES console, however the game cartridge included a special custom processor chip called the "Super FX chip" since the original computer inside the SNES console was not powerful enough and have the capability to perform the mathematical calculations to draw 3D shapes in the moment. Myst was a trailblazer for this category because it solved this problem in a very unique way.

We've all seen games like Super Mario 64, released in 1996 on the Nintendo 64 console, with it's unique 3D graphics that make characters look very low-resolution and blocky rather than like real humans. These early games solve the computing limitation problem by adding as few "polygons" as possible. Games do what's called rendering, which is performing mathematical calculations to "draw" all of your assets - your characters, walls, rocks, enemies, items, etc. Think about drawing a picture of a person's face, but you can only use straight lines. How many lines would you need? You could make the outline of the face an octagon for 8 lines, the eyes can be long diamonds for 4 lines each, the nose can be 2 lines in a greater than shape >, and a mouth can be drawn like the bottom half of a pentagon for another 4 lines. This would be a total of 22 lines, and this would not take very long to draw at all, and a kindergartener would be able to draw this from its simplicity. If you can only draw with straight lines but you wanted the person's face to look a lot more detailed, you could use thousands - or even tens of thousands - of very small, intricate lines to make a perfect looking circle. You can define all of the dimples and wrinkles, even freckles and every aspect of a human face, but think about how long this would take to draw thousands of small straight lines. Give a child in kindergarten this task, and it would be impossible to get the result you are looking for. This is how it is for computers in the 90's. When making a game, you are telling the computer what to display. The game needs to render the objects by drawing lines between points on a graph. The more points there are, the longer it will take to render. That's why games look so low resolution, this style is what's called low-poly, since the 3D models have as few polygons for the computer to draw as possible. This is how Nintendo and others worked around the fact that the computers of their time were not powerful enough for the great graphics we see today, but Myst solved this problem in a completely different way.

The creators of Myst decided instead of drawing the world around you in 3D in real-time while you are playing the game, it would render the environment before-hand. The developers made an entire world in 3D at their own pace and allowed the computer ample time to render the graphics during the designated loading time, allowing the gameplay to have a good pace of play without slowing down or sacrificing the detail in the design. This leads to a very different play style however, and is not what we think of today as a 3D game. It was a point and click style, with pre-rendered environment mostly looking like still images the player can interact with, but it still has moving parts. When you click a wheel on the screen it actually turns, but like a stop-motion film. You can turn pages in a book, ride an elevator, and much more, but in a stop motion looking way. And what's great is the audience loved it! This style became a staple for adventure games for decades after, with new games keeping the stop motion style even when our modern computers can handle better graphics. People just like this look, people like this adventure, and more importantly, people can notice the personality and value making something great when you give yourself limitations.

That's what brings me to my decision. I love the style of Myst and everything it has accomplished, and it is a huge inspiration for me when I'm thinking about my game. I am excited to learn about the programming side of it, and I really want to learn how to make it the same way the developers did back in the early 90's, before we had today's modern programming tools like Unity or Unreal Engine or Blender. What I am working on now is the story, and this is what will set my game apart from all others. The style I will try to make uniquely mine, but it is heavily inspired by Myst and art styles from other games, but the story is inspired by my own life experiences. Others may have similar experiences, but the way I portray it in a game is unique to me. I am spending a lot of my free time finalising the story, and that is something I may keep hidden until demos or one of the early releases of the game to prevent spoiling the surprise.

I am excited to share more about the development process, and next blog post I can share a bit of the process, but without giving too many details about the story to spoil the game and the ending. I am very proud of what I have come up with so far, and I cannot wait to show the progress when it becomes tangible. Thank you to anyone who may be reading, if you have any questions or recommendations as usual you can email me at daniel@kenndoesdev.com

Daniel Kennedy | Game Historian and Designer