Ah, Drop Fighter. A sad tale.

I love the very specific genre of futuristic flying 3d shooty games. The first one I really got into was Star Fighter 3000 on the Acorn A3010 (from the Archimedes family of computers used in schools).

At the time, the fast 3d and texture mapped ground, combined with being able to blow up every single item on the map made for a compelling experience. Steady upgrades for your ship and a fun variety of missions kept me playing this for years.

The only game that really equalled it for me was the might Gunmetal on Xbox, about ten years later.

Gunmetal upped the ante by allowing me to transform into a robot and shoot at things with twin machine guns and backpack-mounted rockets. Other notable entries for me around this genre are Freespace 2, Hellbender and, narrowly, Future Cop.

So, I wanted to write my own. I started in late 2003, and a couple of months later I had the basic flying around, landscapes, weapons, collisions and a mothership in place. It grew and grew, and went through several upgrades and partial rewrites as I reacquired all my defunct programming skills from the 90s.

After working on it on and off until around 2006, I began to listen to other people’s opinions about it. The game had reached the stage where it was quite playable: mission structure was in place, allowing objectives to be completed. I took the game to an Indie developers meet, and left it running on a laptop to see what people thought. Everyone seemed to find the controls difficult. After some cornering, a publisher expressed a degree of interest in seeing the finished product. Talking with one of their programmers in the following weeks rammed the point home: I needed to change the controls so the ship righted itself, and couldn’t roll or pitch more than 45 degrees. I dutifully did so, and immediately it became no fun whatsoever to fly this fighter. And there it was: I was writing this game purely for myself, no one was going to enjoy flying this thing as much as I did, because this kind of arcade-y simulator was just too niche.

Part of the problem was keyboards. I was quite happy playing the game on a keyboard, but it’s simply not the kind of thing PC keyboards were used for. And PCs don’t come with a gamepad. Mouse control for these games always seemed horribly woolly.

In the end, I just let the project die, because in everyone’s eyes it just wasn’t much good. For me, swooping low and fast through exploding buildings never gets old, but I can see how it might for other people.

Every now and again, I keep thinking about doing a little bit on it, just for fun, but it needs so much work to bring it up to standard. A few things can slot in fairly easily, like the latest version of my super awesome blowing-thing-up effects, but in other areas the code just needs completely re-organising. I’m a far better programmer and designer now than I was then, but that’s always the way.

For the record, this is Drop Fighter circa 2006: