Welcome to Xbox Ahoy!

My name is Stuart Brown, and I am a professional web designer by day. I used to blog over at Modern Life, at least until I became bored with it and stopped posting – there’s only so much one can write about web design before it becomes a chore.

My true love as far as programming is concerned is games programming – indeed, I was a games programmer before I picked up HTML and forged a career for myself as a web dev – and it is my wish to return to games development again, at least as a hobbyist.

AMOS was my language of choice back in ’92 – I was a naught but 11 years old with some rudimentary BASIC programming skills derived from a ZX Spectrum 128K which I spent a good deal of time with. Courtesy of a copy of Amiga Format, I laid my hands on a copy of a demo of ‘Easy AMOS’ – a cut down version of the AMOS language designed for ease of use.

I worked through some of the tutorials in AF and quickly spent many after school hours dabbling with AMOS – as soon as I had scraped together enough pocket money, I had purchased the full version of Easy AMOS and would start trying my hand at a variety of projects.

In the years that followed, despite the limitations of AMOS (it was a high level language running on a 14MHz CPU) I produced countless small projects, tech demos and games. I eventually graduated to Amos Pro, a more feature complete
version, and managed to produce something which resembled a complete game.

It was called ‘Krusha’, and the basic premise was simple: You are a car, in an arena. There are smaller cars in the arena. You can crush them for points. However! There is a large steamroller in the level too, hell-bent on crushing you. So, the trick was to crush cars, collect points, while simultaneously avoiding the steamroller (where one touch is instant death).

It was pretty good fun. Despite having the occasional graphical glitch, it was pretty well polished (and well tested). I sent it into Amiga Format’s ‘Reader Games’ section. It was featured, they seemed to like it and it was eventually picked up for distribution by a PD company.

So ends the tale of Krusha – despite being young (circa 13-14 at the time of submission to AF), I managed to get some recognition for my game. I carried on with AMOS, producing more polished stuff, but nothing that I was ever happy to release.

With the advent of college at 16 (and my first access to the internet) I became interested in HTML, JavaScript etc. and spent the next decade working on web related technologies. My games programming fell by the wayside.