A labor of love.
For most of us, that’s an expression that we don’t use very often. We have hobbies, we have interests, we even have loves of our lives, but how many of us actually labor over those loves?
Adam Butcher certainly has. 13 years ago, this 26 year old University grad began making “The game that [he] always wanted to make.” Back then, the indie community wasn’t the hugely successful scene it is today and it didn’t get a lot of media attention. In fact, indie games weren’t even called that; they were Freeware or Shareware (we remember playing many of them in our time, but their names have since faded into obscurity).
Butcher’s website describes his epic saga Tobias and the Dark Sceptres as “a Zelda rip-off that is nothing like Zelda. A labor of love. A game that time forgot. 13 years mis-spent.”
In his behind-the-scenes documentary (also fully animated by Butcher), he describes the innocent beginnings of the game using programs like Klik & Play and Multimedia Fusion (MMF). He had big dreams from the start, since his story revolved around “the forces of all darkness in the world.” He began by using larger-than-normal graphics, using a hybrid of stock game code with his own code only to scrap it and write his own code from scratch, and ultimately went back to redesign and recode segments of the game that lacked the refinement of an additional six years of experience.
It was a vicious cycle of code, animate, recode, reanimate - Butcher’s personal albatross.
Since completing Tobias and the Dark Sceptres, Butcher has released his game for free download on his website.
Hats off, Mr. Butcher. Well done.
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