The birth of an idea
July 25th 2004 – early August 2004

When I first had the idea for a Gladiator game, I was standing in the video store looking at a new game for the xbox that just came in called 'Gladius'. As I was reading the blurb on the back, I envisioned the game in my mind, and feel in love with it. I wasn't disappointed by what Gladius turned out to be, it was a great game, but the urge inside me to see the game I imagined come to life was too great to ignore.

Before the idea of a gladiator game I hadn't actually programmed anything in a number of years. The games I did create were all done in the popular macintosh software Hypercard, for those that don't know what Hypercard is, for shame. Hypercard influenced the creation of http and javascript, and at one stage the biggest selling computer game was made within it. Enough history, let's get back to 2004 and to the birth of an idea.

It was around this time that I discovered Hypercard's spiritual successor, Revolution, and quickly jumped at the chance to try it out. Before putting code to screen, I decided to try something different, putting pen to paper first. I produced a small design document that spanned a couple dozen pages, perhaps more a collection of ideas than anything as formal as a design document. But it was more than I had ever done before, usually my apporach was diving head first into the game and ending up with terrible spaghetti code.

Alongside writing my first (semi) design document, I took the time to draw how I visioned the game should look. To the left you can see two mockups I did of the layout when entering the arena. It shows some design elements that didn't make it into Gladiator Trials II, but we will go into detail on those in later chapters. This was the most pre-work I had ever done, it was a whole two weeks worth of work before I wrote any code at all. I admit two weeks is hardly long enough, but it's certainly an improvement from having an idea and going straight to coding.

After looking over the design document I came to realize something, the game was far too big. It would have taken a small team years to create. I had only 6 months, after that I was to be a full-time student in university and felt I would have little time left to dedicate to my hobbies. I knew what had to be done, but it wasn't an easy choice. I had to nip and tuck at all those nice ideas, to get down to the core gameplay and down to a reasonable time frame. The first to go was also the hardest to drop, the deep role playing elements. I'm a big fan of RPGs and have tried, unsuccessfully, to create one since I first learnt how to print "hello world".

First artwork, showing the arena entrance GUI.

Original layout of arena selection screen.