Thank you for visiting Blazing Games

A Brief History of the Quest

To understand the history of Coffee Quest, it is important to first understand why the game was created in the first place. To do this, we have to go way back in time to the year 1997. A lot was going on at that time, but the most important thing for me was the introduction of Borland's JBuilder tool. Java had been released with the command line development tools freely available from Sun. I was a fan of the Borland IDEs as I really liked the ability to edit, compile, and debug code all from within a single program. Drag and Drop user interface design (visual programming) was not that important to me, and still isn't. Still, I did trust Borland and had heard about Java so decided I would get a copy of JBuilder and see for myself if Java would solve the problem I had.

The problem was the Internet. I wanted to create games that would be playable from within a browser that would work on any computer. If the game was downloaded as it was needed, then the player would be able to play the game without having to go through a download and installation process. More importantly, the person would always be playing the latest version of the game. Also, because there could be advertising on the website, it would be possible to let the player's play this game for free. HTML just didn't have the capability. A company called Netscape, who's namesake browser was the standard browser of the time, was solving the problem two ways. First they were introducing a scripting language to the browser called JavaScript, and more importantly, they were supporting Sun's Java language by allowing Java applets to be embedded into a HTML page.

I probably could have started learning Java much earlier, but I wanted a complete development environment. With my programming style, I would probably have been just as productive using a good text editor (like emacs) and the command line tools that Sun freely provided. It would have been cheaper. In fact, today I use the freely available eclipse IDE (which is available for Windows, Linux, and Macintosh OSX) for my Java development.

After getting JBuilder, I started learning the Java language, which was actually very easy as it is fairly similar to C++ which was my programming language of choice before Java. In fact, I am a firm believer that once you know how to program in one programming language, it is easy to learn any other programming language. Programming is really about understanding a few core concepts. Three days after getting JBuilder, I finished my first Java game. At that point I decided to create my own home page which I called Game of the Month.

I decided that I really wanted to develop a role-playing game in Java. I had been working on a really elaborate C++ role-playing game but really hadn't gotten that far into the development of it largely because I was trying to do too much with the game. For the Java role-playing game, it was decided that the best approach would be to build the game in stages slowly adding more and more role-playing features to the game. This is outlined in more details in the next section.

Four Coffee Quests were released. At that point I was doing a lot of consulting so my home page got put on hiatus. A few years later, after the dot-com bubble burst, I decided to start my own Blazing Games Domain. Part of this new site featured updated versions of my Coffee Quest series. While the first four games have been released in an enhanced format, at the time I wrote this I have not yet finished later games in the series though still have plans to.

Previous page
Introduction Page 3

About - Privacy Policy - Contact - Links - FAQ
Copyright © 2006 Blazing Games Inc. All Rights Reserved