It was 1995 when the German game development studio Blue Byte released Schleichfahrt – the English version was named Archimedean Dynasty.
I was 21 at that time and immediately fell in love with that game. It never let me go even after years. The successors Aquanox 1 and 2 never reached the flair of the original, not because of the setting or graphics, no because the decision was made to open those games to a wider audience. In plain words, they made shooters out of something that really felt like an underwater world before with things like intertia, tides, …
Starting with the Commodore 64 and later Amiga I dived deep into programming, mainly in Assembly language, later on PC using C, C++. Around 2005 I felt the need to create something like Schleichfahrt by myself. I started several prototypes in BlitzBasic3D and C++ with Irrlicht.
Some screenshots from that era, here the BlitzBasic version:
Some shots from the Irrlicht version:
So what happened to those prototypes? Well… real life kicked in, I got married, became a dad and employed in a big company where I coded day in and out C++ and C# for medical devices.
17 years have passed since then until I took the bite in 2020 to go the self employed route as a game developer. Mainly working on a game called Sea Power I never could stop thinking about that pitch to create a game in the vast of the ocean in a dark and dystopic future!