TONY'S INTRODUCTION

Playniax is a small independent software development company. It is based in the Netherlands and it is founded by Tony Smits and Peter van Driel.

My name is Tony and this is my first so called post for our brand new website. Let me tell you something about myself.

I got my first computers when I was around 12 years old. It was a second hand Sinclair ZX81.  I remember writing programs, cramping them in to 1 kilobyte of memory and running them in black and white. Having seen the C64, I was instantly bored with the Sinclair. So, I harassed my parents into buying a C64 for me (and my sister of course). Obviously she barely got a chance to use it because I was abusing it most of the time. At first, like most people I was only interested in playing games. The first game I played on the C64 was Defender. After a while, I started to experiment in BASIC. Eventually, I was writing my own programs and ‘games’. When BASIC became to limited I moved on to machine code and I soon became familiair with interrupts, vertical blank, sprites etc… Looking back. I have many fond memories of hours spent behind this machine programming and playing games.

After the C64 I bought the Amiga. I became a member of a so called demo group and it was around this period that my programming skills where beginning to take off. At the same time I was beginning to get interested in creating games professionally. I started to work on an engine that could handle smooth scrolling, so called BOBS (Blitter objects or software sprites) and pixel perfect collision. This took quite some effort because I needed the game to have 32 colours on screen (which was a lot back then) and move smoothly at the same time. This was done in 100% 68000 machine code. I wasn’t very good at making graphics, so I started looking for an artist. After a long time and many disappointments, I met with Peter and we started to work on a game that eventually became ‘Extrial’ for the Amiga. Unfortunatelly, when we finished, Commodore went bankrupt. Consequently, it became extremely difficult to find a publisher. Eventually, we did sell Extrial, but there was no point in making another Amiga game. The game market as a whole collapsed.

After the Amiga ‘period’, I took a job as a system administrator. The computer industry changed a lot during this period. Surprisingly, the most inferior machine, the PC, became the standard. In those days I had 4096 colours, stereo sound and multitasking on my Amiga. The PC was barely able to display a picture, make a bleep or run one program at a time. Consequently, I had no interest in making games for this platform. However, the PC has evolved enough to use it as a gaming platform with its 3d graphics and 32 bit colour on very high resolutions.

Like a lot of people, I enjoy surfing the internet. Aside the obvious things, I especially love retro related stuff like  emulators, retro game remakes and the C64 remixes. There are some amazing remixes out there. Especially when I’m working, I listen a lot to slayradio.com. I guess I’m very nostalgic.

So what about playniax.com and how it became to be?

Over the years I tried to find a tool to make games on the PC. I don’t like unnecessary complicated tools. It’s all about productivity.  I was not happy with the tools available until I found DarkBASIC and BlitzBASIC. Eventually my tool of choice became BlitzMAX. With this program, my interest in creating games was revived and I showed Peter what we could do with it. Like myself, he was impressed and we decided to make a new game which was based on defender (Arcade) and Datastorm (Amiga). A demo of our game will be available soon but you can check out a screenshot above. In a way, it has become ‘full circle’. So playniax.com is about fun and nostalgia, but instead of playing the old game for nostalgic reasons, we try to bring new ones to the table. We are not a big game studio and we are not really trying to be. We didn’t do any research on market demands and we are not trying to make the best selling game ever. We make games that WE like to play and hopefully other people will too.

But talk is cheap so I’ll go back to work.

P.S. I would like to thank Franklin de Groot for his great work and helping us with this website and Tommy Cools for checking my english.

WRITTEN BY TONY