Shockwave was generated by Macromedia Director (the spiritual precursor to Flash) and had a lovely IDE with a fantastic debugger and excellent 3D, video and audio support. You could make "proper" games in it, I once hooked it up to some hardware tilt sensors to make a Joust clone you could play by flapping your arms.<p>The scripting language Lingo was a little bit gumby but perfectly serviceable. The main engine limitation was IIRC you could only have 256 sprite channels. I was always disappointed that Flash took hold instead of the more powerful Shockwave platform.<p>To this day when programming Ruby I always mistype "puts" as "put" thanks to Lingo still burned into my fingers.
Thank you for this lovely write up, it reminds me of the joy of reverse engineering. It teaches us a lot, it is how I got into the industry.<p>Nowadays it can be a bit more challenging - at least for high budget productions as the games can be a lot more complicated, and there are anti piracy measurements in some which means it requires a bit more effort into seeing the information - for example all strings would be encrypted. Modifying anything at all could mean the game will not start or it will crash on purpose. Similarly for multi player games, with anti cheat protection. Nothing is impossible though ;)<p>Indie games should have relatively low barriers to entry, however :)
One of my concentrations in college was Multimedia Programming in Shockwave. I build a 3D, multiplayer version of Spy Vs. Spy with randomly generated levels.<p>The host would generate a 2D array of objects and locations and then transmit to the client. I felt so smart back then.<p>The 3D engine was pretty easy to work with. I hand-coded and hard-coded every single animation, since it was faster than learning how to animate.<p>I miss working with Shockwave, it provided a wonderful combination of power and accessibility. I've found Unity to be the closest in features, but don't get the same thrill from it.<p>Ah college.
Ah geez, I remember Cartoon Cartoon Summer Resort like it was yesterday! I'd leave the desktop running for 30 minutes while it loaded because dialup was sluggish as hell.<p>I really enjoyed your writing style and it's definitely inspired me to have a poke around some other games too!<p>Thanks :)