I started writing cricket games in 1991 after I finished my GCSEs as I had a long summer holiday ahead of me and needed something to keep me occupied.
So, what sparked it all off?
Well, at the start of the holiday I decided to dig out my trusty old BBC B Micro from the depths of a large cupboard and I started to play one of my favourite games called Howzat! (the other one being Football Manager which I wasted a large proportion of my young teenage years playing). I noticed that this games was written in BASIC and, combined with the knowledge that you could write BASIC programs on the PC, it seemed probable that I might be able to get Howzat! working on my PC! This would have been great - I could get to play my favourite game of all and leave the BBC in the cupboard forever.
So, the next problem was how do I copy the code over to the PC? The only media I had available to the BBC was audio tape and I had no way of hooking this up to the PC. I had no printer for the BBC either. I decided I had to do it manually! Don't you just love the good old days :o) However, it gets worse. Don't ask me why (to be honest, I can't really remember) but I wasn't able to get the BBC and PC anywhere near each other. Indeed, the BBC was upstairs and the PC downstairs so this is what I had to do:
I would sit upstairs in front of the BBC showing the Howzat! listing and my brother, Richard, would sit downstairs in front of the PC with a text editor open. Then I would SHOUT! the code downstairs, he would do the best he could to understand and enter it in the text editor as he went along. We got used to slang terms like "chris45" for "chr$(45)" but, as you can imagine, there were a hell of a lot of errors introduced this way.
And surprise, surprise, it didnt work after importing into Quick Basic 4.5, nor either after spending many many hours fixing the syntax errors.
So, I gave up on that one - never would there be little 8x8 characters representing men, sliding across something vaguely representing a cricket field. However, it gave me and idea - why don't I write one from scratch?! I'd never programmed before but looking at the Howzat! code I had gained a pretty good idea of what was inolved in writing such a game. Whatsmore, Quick BASIC is a pretty readable language and seeing as a cricket game would not require much processing power, this seemed a natural choice.
After a few months of furious development code, I completed my first ever game, Sticky Wicket v2.00 (there was no version 1.00 because I thought people would feel a version 1.00 would be too buggy to bother with :o) ) and released it into the shareware market. I can't really remember much about the early versions although I suspect they were prone to give some rather unrealistic totals (all out for about 40 etc) and I think it used to be VERY difficult to win a game!
In the meantime, I wanted to do something new. Since, Sticky Wicket is based on one-day county cricket, I decided to write a more advanced cricket games based on one-day international cricket where the team would play around grounds all over the world rather than all over the england. I started writing this game at the start of 1992 and I used sections of the Sticky Wicket code as a starting point. The "arcade" (if you can call it that!) section is very similar to that for Sticky Wicket but the strategy/stats section and tournament structure is completely new and there is generally a lot more to it.
In May 1992, I released this game, World Cup Cricket (ver 2.00, for the same reasons as above), into the the shareware market and offered registered users of Sticky Wicket a discount if they purchased this game too (and vica versa). Incidentally, the registration fees were �15 for each game (Sticky Wicket registered version included a 2-player game which has since been scrapped) or �25 for both games. When someone registered for a game I would send them a floppy disk of the latest registered version and a print-out of the on-disk documentation in a jiffy bag. I didn't think it was worthwhile to get professionally printed documentation.
Both games were given minor updates (because I had uni to consider) and it was not until September 1996 that I did my first major updates making both games much more exciting to play since the matches were much more likely to go down to the wire. To be honest, both games look rubbish (even back in those days) but (as I have been told be a number of players) they are very addictive. I think this has a lot to do with the fact that everything happens very quickly. The next ball keeps coming; the screens flip from one to another instantaneously - you're not even allowed to blink! As, a small aside, I think this is where a lot of modern day games fall down. They look great don't they? But are they slick? I think its more important for a game to "keep coming at you" than to look as realistic as, say, on TV.
All in all, I received around 350 registrations (from over 200 different registered users). About 300 of these came before the major updates of September 1996. Maybe those updates weren't so good after all! In all fairness, I think the games were truly dated, even by then.
In the summer of 1995, I set to work on a windows version of World Cup Cricket using Visual Basic 2. I came across many technical issues which eventually resulted in me scrapping the project. Believe it or not, but it seemed almost impossible to get a ball moving smoothly across the screen! Animation under Windows back in those days was a complete nigthmare. I also had lots of memory problems since my PC was rather lacking in that department.
In my upper sixth form I started to get involved in the Amiga computer. A lot of my friends were really into this neat little machine and had been for some time. I was fed up with my IBM PS/1 (286 processor) so took the plunge and purchased a brand new Amiga (A1200). After a short time with this great games computer (and, yes, I know it was superb for so many other things than that too) I realised the potential for writing a superb cricket game. The graphics could be much smarter and the animation could be on another planet compared to my PC games. Features like smoothly scrolling fields, men that actually look like men and look like they are running as opposed to gliding, stumps that animate when they are broken, isometric 3D graphics, made the whole thing really exciting. Whatsmore, there was a superb BASIC programming language/tool on the Amiga which could make all this possible - the mighty AMOS Professional!
So, a couple of months before my A-Level exams (hmmmmm - that was sensible) I began work on this huge project with some assistance in the graphics department from a classmate, Martin. I think I actually worked on it between exams too(!) but most of my work came in the summer holidays to follow and then the holidays between terms at uni. Unfortunately, I never did manage to finish this game (also called World Cup Cricket) though I did come close (about 95% complete) and you can find some screenshots on this site. I may make the incomplete game downloadable if I get enough requests but since the amiga is now a dead platform, I have no intention to complete the game.
In August 2001, I decided to make both Sticky Wicket and World Cup Cricket freeware since they are now very out-dated and so there is no reason why anyone should (or would) pay to get the full game. Also, its nice to have free software out there, isn't it? I won't be updating the games anymore - not least because I can't really remember how they work! but also because of the lack of demand.
I'm not sure whether I will write another cricket game or not. I certainly would like to but to make something good requires giving up a huge amount of time and (as with the Amiga and Windows versions) even then there is no guarantee that completion will be always be possible...