Rueda

At age 16, I spent about 6 months coding a Wheel of Fortune clone in AMOS on my Commodore Amiga. I then updated it from college at Virginia Tech, using my Amiga 3000UX that was a requirement as a CS student at the time.

Provided is the original LHA file for Rueda 1.3e, which crazily enough, is still available on Aminet after I uploaded it 31 years ago! You just need to expand the LHA, assign RUEDA: to the DATA folder, and then run the Rueda! executable. I am guessing I could have made that process more elegant. It seems kinda bananas to me now to expect someone to do that extra step in a terminal to play the game.

It blows my mind that I didn't finish another game until 30 years later, because I *love* making games. Much like comics, they utilize a wide array of creative arts that I enjoy: sound design, music, drawing, UI, logic, typography, movement, animation, etc. They're also similar to comics in that you can spend years on something that someone might give 5 minutes of attention to, if you're lucky!

Strangely I think this game holds up (despite the painful "CATAGORY" typo, good lord). It seems unlikely to me now that I made the title music, but who knows, I stumbled through making a li'l theme song for Save Picoville in Pico 8. The very hip hop '90s sound effects crack me up. Also the puzzles are pretty weak. But hey, I was 16.

Here I am with my A500 and external hard drive without a cover, and a fan cooling it along with the 1200 baud modem in the back (I ran a BBS called The Real Flavor at the time):

I was gifted an Armiga years ago, which is basically a 3.5" floppy disk with a Cubieboard attached running Android, and it can digitize old Amiga floppies. I've been toting around a wooden box full of floppies for decades, and though many barfed, I was able to extract several ADFs from my ancient collection. I found several mockups indicating the start of Rueda 1.4 (see below), which I apparently abandoned as soon as I sold my Amiga 1200. I must have had the A1200 for only a few months, as I don't remember it at all.

I do love my lightswitch UI graphics, and was pleased to see that I realized my error in not just using plain colors on the spinning wheel. I think I painstakingly drew out all the numbers on a large version of the wheel in DeluxePaint, so was hellbent on using that work, even if it completely fell apart when shrunk down in v1.3. Anyway, v1.4 was going to fix that error, as well as support 4 players with custom avatars, but I don't think I ever got further than these mockups.

Are you ALIVE or DEAD? I am definitely going to use those chunky lightswitches somewhere.