Saturday, August 18, 2012

F1-Maths (1996)

When I was 15, in 1996, I did not yet have ready access to a Turbo Pascal compiler; as far as PC programming went, I still worked within the confines of QuickBasic.  I can't exactly recall how I got it into my head to write an educational game - I think it might have started out as a school project - but that's what I did.  Thus F1-Maths was born, a palpitating game where you get to race cars in order to test your mental calculation prowess!  Or at least that was the idea, anyway.

There was some passing interest from a neighbouring schoolboard to buy the game for a nominal fee; though the idea never came to fruition, it was the first time I truly came into contact with the concept of time spent in effort being worth money.  Specifically, it opened my eyes to the fact that said effort need not be unpleasant in order to be valuable from an financial standpoint.

You can tailor the difficult level for each player in order to level the playing field between people of different skills, and with USB now making it trivial to connect multiple keyboards to the same PC, the game would actually be much better to play with everybody having their own keyboard.


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