The Making of Toyland

Who wrote this game

My name is Rainald Menge - I am a student in Cologne (Germany) and will become a teacher if I ever manage to do my exam and get a job.

The History of Writing an OS/2 Game

I have been using OS/2 since 2.0 was released. I bought that one and was rather impressed by the things I could do - but since that version did have many problems with emulation (I never managed to run ANY Dos game with sound) and I was not connected to the internet thus not able to get all those important progs such as Emacs, gcc, POV-Ray and so on it took me quite a while to fall in love with that OS. But when OS/2 2.1 was released I was really impressed. From that time - and the time I got connected to the net (which was one month later) I did everything with OS/2. I dumped my wordprocessing software for LaTeX and my IDE for Emacs. I got the gcc compiler and started to write my first C-Application. Then I decided to do some C++ stuff and started to write my own Class-Library connected with a MULE type game (which I never finished). The idea Toyland came to my mind when my little son Robin was born in 1993 - actually the first name for the game was Baby Jim with a baby looking for balloons - I only had the idea for the first world.

The Graphics

Since I am a very lousy graphical artist I tried POV-Ray which gave me the chance to do nice graphics. The problem with POV-Ray is that it is really hard to do a human being such as a baby - but then I discovered the puppet of my little daughter Elena (born in May '95) which only had regular shapes - so T(r)oy was born. The story behind the game came to my mind bit by bit.

The Future

Although I will try to finish the 1.0 version by the end of 1995 this will not be the final version. Depending on the amount of registrations my work for those people will continue. I have already fallen in love with programming this game and I won't stop in the near future. If you register your copy of Toyland you will of course benefit from each new version - I won't charge extra money for add-ons. Youw will always be able to use new levels, worlds or features with your registration code.

I also plan to do a second game for OS/2 (the time I can spend on that project depends on the number of registrations as well as the time I will spend on improving Toyland). I have two basic ideas: Toyland II - a different type of puzzle game which is more like The Incredible Machine and an adventure game.

return to the Toyland page.