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Thanks for visiting!
Sean

Sean: Well firstly thanks for your time Mark for this interview, never imagined I would get to interview you! When did you create Grid Wars?
Mark: Grid Wars was started in mid December 2005. Initially posted on yakyak board in mid January. It was an interactive development. People tested, gave feedback and I incorporated suggestions almost daily. I think by February I had reached version 2.0 and hence the name change to Grid Wars 2. Further development eventually led to version 5.4 (Various milestones along the way - Linux and Mac builds, etc)

Sean: Was Grid Wars your first Open source game to create or have you made others?
Mark: Most of my games have included source code with them. I’ve learned much from various games over the years by peering into the code. See here.

Sean: How long did it take you to make Grid Wars and what inspired you to do it?
Mark: Grid Wars sort of evolved over the course of a couple months. I started with the fluid grid effect and added various enemy types to the framework. I had many more ideas that were pruned out - the public mostly wanted a Geometry Wars game for PC - so I was pushed in that direction. Initially it was inspiration from playing Geometry Wars that is what got me to reproduce the grid effect. But after that it was my love of vector, shooty games that kept me going.

Sean: What coding language is Grid Wars written in, and did you face any problems in making the game cross platform?
Mark: It is written in BlitzMax (OO C/Basic mix) and with minor changes to music handling and directx/opengl layers it easily compiled to Linux and Mac versions.

Sean: Do you have any new projects in the works?
Mark: I’m working on several new game ideas (in what little spare time I have, unfortunately) in September 2006 I completed coding Polarity+ which was released shortly after. I just completed another 360 shooter, a sequel of sorts to GridWars called AtomHex.  It’s being evaluated by some publishers and should be available for download any day now (hopefully this year!) Next up should be Trinistar - a sorta sequel to Sinistar.

Sean: Thats perfect! Thanks again for your time Mark!

Interested in playing Grid Wars? Check out my previous post on it which includes download links!