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Bert the Barbarian
Bert the Barbarian was my first attempt at making a clay-animated videogame. It was written in 1999, and used the DIV game creation language. This was quite an old and outdated piece of software even back then (it was MS-DOS based and limited to 256 colour graphics, among other things) but at the time I was so excited at the prospect of making PC games that I didn't care. But in the end, this was one of the factors that led me to discontinue development.
More significant were the design mistakes I made along the way. At the time I was still thinking too much like an animator and not enough like a game developer - Bert has some really nice animation sequences, but the gameplay is too rigid and unresponsive to be properly successful. Making this game taught me a lot about good game design - after I abandoned it, I decided I'd have to take things right back to basics and try to make a very simple game that had a good feel to it, and no fancy animation to get in the way. This led to the creation of Platypus.
Anyway, despite its faults, it's still fun for a few minutes, and the animation does still look nice to me even now (despite being in 256 colours). And I am quite fond of the character - I would like to make a new Bert the Barbarian game one day. Slicing stuff into bits with a big sword will always have a certain appeal...
Oh, and one other thing. I entered Bert in PC Zone magazine's "DIV Game Creator 2000" competition, and it won first prize, which was a brand new PC with all the trimmings. I was naturally very happy about that, and it would have been an excellent result, except that it was all destroyed almost immediately afterwards when my house burned down (you can read about this in my Making of Platypus story).
Anyway, here's the game. Enjoy.
> Download Bert the Barbarian (Windows version)
System Requirements: 300 MHZ Intel or AMD Processor, Windows 95/98/ME/2000/XP, DirectX 7.0 or newer, Direct3D compatible video chipset.
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