Super Bobby World
Super Bobby World was my very first “big” hobby project, and was released back in 2003.
It is a 2D platform game inspired by Monty On The Run on the Commodore 64, and Super Mario and Zelda on the NES…
This game was made in Flash 5, long before flash had support for videos, dropshadow filters or bitmap manipulation. To make your game, and keep a fluid framerate you had to work around the limitations. What I had to do was:
- Small viewport (less to render)
- No background (less to render, but also less to download)
- Single screen levels (although quite fancy transitions between screens)
Also, broadband was rare back then. I had a 56k modem at this time, so filesize was also an issue! Meaning I had to use graphics sparingly. The game ended at around 300kb, which was a lot (but still reasonably for a game). I built a fancy loader to look at while the game preloaded in the background (I guess you won’t even be able to see it today).
I don’t remember how much time I spent on this game, but I know that I worked on it full time for the last two weeks of its production. By then I never thought I would have a project with bigger scope as hobby project ever again (little did I know).
The game was well recieved. I even got fan mail for it!!! The counter on the web page reported 300.000 game plays before it broke, but I guess the actual number was much higher since many portals take the swf and host it on their own sites.