David Amlaw

Coding

I started coding when I was about 8 years old when my parents brought home a Commodore 64 computer. This must have been 1982 and home computers were still kind of a novelty. My dad saw us start it up and figure out how to play some game on it and that was all he needed to see. He never looked at it again. My brother and my mom used it as a gaming machine and I liked to play some of the games too but I was fascinated with the idea that I could write my own programs and have this machine execute them. So I started reading the book.

I started out writing choose your own adventure type text based games and eventually moved on to simple sprite graphics and simple logic games like tic tac toe and connect 4. My crowning achievement was a battleship game where the computer basically picked random grid locations and started an explore outward from a hit in sequential directions until the ship was destroyed. I remember it taking a lot of code, probably much more than necessary, but it worked and I loved it. I also started a 2d scrolling spaceship action game but only got as far as having the ship move at a constant speed through some obstacles which were avoided by going up or down. It was a very basic game. 1 level which you could either win or lose. The end.

Anyhow, after the Commodore I lost interest in computers in a big way. It was not until after my son was born and computers were on the world wide web that I even considered giving it a go again. I remember being in an intro to computer graphics class at Fullerton College in Southern California and being ignored with my hand in the air half the time. My question was ‘how do you turn one of these on?’. They were first generation iMacs (the round colorful ones). Once I got past the hurdle of powering it up and the initial confusion of the gui I dove right back in and was working as a graphic artist using Photoshop, Illustrator, and Dreamweaver to create websites and printed materials for small companies within a year. I switched to Linux a couple years later and never looked back.

This section is about current and past projects related to coding and how working with computers has become a core part of my life. I recently started a 2d scrolling spaceship action game inspired by my C64 attempt but this time I am going all out. 16 Levels, 10 player ships, dozens of enemies, a solid backstory and plot development, original music for each level, multiple strategies for gameplay, tons of original graphics, and a good sense of humor. It’s called Space Smuggler Blooze and I will definitely be talking more about it in this section. For now, my goal is to have a 3 level demo version available online by end of August 2025, and to have the full version out by spring 2026. It’s a lot of work, specifically in the generation and integration of graphic images, but I have leveraged stable diffusion to the max with 3 highly trained models doing the bulk of the work for me. Much more on all of this to come.

Coding Galleries

Web & Apps
Video Games

Most Recent ‘Coding’ Articles