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One of the most exciting games of the year was developed using software that was first released 40 years ago. Transfer point It looks and plays like a classic point-and-click adventure game on Mac, and there’s a very good reason for that: it was developed with World Builder, a game creation tool that was first released in 1986 and has been free ever since. “The initial impetus was wanting to share this tool that was really innovative at the time, and meant a lot to me as a kid,” says developer Mike Piontek. “But the plan was to spend a few weeks on it, and I ended up doing it for over a year.”
Piontek first became obsessed with adventure games as a kid, and a lot of that was because of Silicon Beach Software, the now-defunct developer behind games like Dark Castle. The studio also developed creative tools such as SuperPaint and World Builder, and from the age of 11 Piontek began experimenting with point-and-click design of his own. He now makes his living as a software developer, but still shares his love of classic gaming on Twitch — and that’s where Transfer point He started.
“It became a puzzle how to bring all these disparate ideas together.”
“I thought it would be fun to create a little game in World Builder, to introduce more people to it,” Piontek explains. It started as a community project. He would ask viewers for ideas, then ask everyone to vote on the best one before implementing it. This is how the game’s opening scene ended at a bus station in the middle of nowhere. Eventually, there were so many different ideas that Piontek realized that the game could be much bigger than what he initially planned. “It became a puzzle of how to bring all these disparate ideas together,” he explains.
Although he’s been using the software for decades, Piontek says there are some challenges that come with developing games in World Builder, especially compared to more modern tools. Although the program is designed to be simple—you don’t need to know how to program to use it—it still has its quirks.
“I think the most challenging aspect is that variables – where you can track what the player did – cannot have custom names and can only store numbers,” Piontek explains. “If you want to remember that the player opened a soda can in modern language, you might have a variable named ‘soda’ that you set to ‘open.’ In World Builder, the best thing you can do is set S3# to 1, for example. If the player drank some soda, you could set S3# to 2. You’ll need to keep good notes on what that means, and make sure you don’t accidentally use that variable for anything else! It’s funny, a lot of aspects of making a game in World Builder actually remind me of it. Playing Old adventure games.
But for Piontek, it’s those kinds of quirks that make this project interesting. Constraints can breed creativity after all. “Having to overcome limitations is transformative,” he says. “I want to step back from these boundaries and see what I can get away with.” Going through this process from start to finish was particularly helpful. Although he has been playing with World Builder and designing games as a hobby since he was young, he usually never actually finishes them. but Transfer point It’s a real game you can try now – it is To play in the browserAnd you can too Buy it on Itch.io.
“I started with literally nothing, set aside a few hours a week, and created something that I thought was worthwhile and meaningful.”
“I think the biggest thing I’ve learned is that… He can “Do those final steps,” he says. “I think anyone can make a game and release it if they want to. I find it easy to get caught up in ideas that I wish I had more time, or not feel like my idea is complete enough to get started. But I started with literally nothing, put in a few hours a week, and made something that I thought was worthwhile and meaningful.”
Piontek also isn’t done challenging itself yet. He has another platform in mind Transfer pointwhich is unexpected: a play date. Small yellow handheld scarecrow It does not include a mouse or keyboard, which are essential components for playing these types of games. But BioNTech views these limitations as an “interesting challenge.” And while Playdate may not seem like an obvious fit on a technical level, there’s something about it that connects with Piontek. “Most of all, I think it’s a neat little system that really embodies the excitement I felt as a kid, growing up with a Mac,” he says.