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Table of Contents
Pre-History
The game was originally started sometime 2000ish. It was a very cloudy period.
I'd been making lil games for many years, starting on the Commodore Vic20 with an elaborate masterpiece that put a letter A in the corner of the screen if you pressed space.
'A tractor' (as it was named initially) set out with the goal of allowing Fooli and I to sit on a hill in tractors having a smoke. (Dunno why exactly we wanted to do that, but this remains the official 'Design Document'). Everything else after that bit was made up as we went along.
A tractor v0.01
The earliest reference to any kind of dated version of the game i've found so far is through the waybackmachine site for a-tractor.com, which indicates:
Latest update : 30th Nov 2001 - 0.01a
.. and according to the associated docs & forum snapshots this had a couple of hosted worlds, various building types (including petrol stations), families of some sort and lots of trading goin on. I have no memory of any of this :]
(There was definitely a 0.009.6 at somepoint, which I remember being pretty fabulous, but Im not sure when that was. Also, you'll note in subsequent records that there was at least two v0.01s, following the First Great Schism.)
Further investigations might uncover more release notes from the early period, but initially i've drawn a blank until this post in 2003 also recovered from the waybackmachine site..
Sunday September 21, 2003
0.03.99.3 Update
[ Posted by: Mit | Time: 05:50:44 PM
Lil patch on the main page - jus a couple of fixes, tidyups and extras. Still a bit wonky it seems.. ah well. :] (anyone got a spare copy of boundschecker? :]). Anyway, much more importantly, theres new Spiritualized stuff out, so we should all be happy :) :).
Thursday November 27, 2003
Development Update
[ Posted by: Mit | Time: 06:48:57 PM
“Figured i better post a small news update as its been so long since i been outside the dev universe.. Im still here! *waves*! :)
I'm currently working on and finishing up some pretty major additions to the game - almost certainly the most significant overall structural changes since houses were added back in 0.01 (or whatever it was). Fingers crossed i'll be able to get this ready enough for some sort of closed-beta testing before christmas.
Im not gonna reveal much more about it yet (it'll be a nice surprise..) but suffice to say the few ppl who've seen it so far have kinda liked it, i think.
Oh and its kinda trippy. :)“
I'm not sure what that was about.. stardrive, most likely. I guess it was after this (in 2004) when space was added and the game changed to being 'The Universal' for a long while, and the next v0.01 got done..