Who am I?
My name is Michael VanOverbeek. I am 13 years old, and a hobbyist Visual Basic .NET programmer. I'll program anything from an internet browser, to an RTF editor, to a Siri-like application, all in VB. I've also used it to craft little pranks, like telling a teacher at school that my laptop can talk, and knows everything about the teacher, when in reality, it's just a VB Console App using the SpeechSynthesizer to convert a string to speech. Basically, I like VB programming...
What am I talking about in the topic title?
What I'm talking about is not really a game, but since it actually has a storyline and in-game characters, I'll consider it a game... also the fact you have to upgrade the OS with in-game points, but I'll get into that later.
Basically, if you've heard of an Australian YouTuber named OSFirstTimer, you probably have heard of ShiftOS. This was his project to create a game about an OS that evolved as you played, turning from a command-line to a full on Windows-like OS, with the ability to skin, download apps, etc. The concept was cool, but sadly is wasn't implemented very well and most of the community was there just for OSFirstTimer. This showed when he stepped away and let the community help out more with development. It happened all the way until June 1st, 2015 (I'm serious.) when the devs said "Alright, let's shut it down. No one's interested anymore and the codebase is horrible". I was one of the devs, and the admin of their forum.
What I plan on doing is taking what OSFirstTimer had in mind, and expanding it as much as humanly possible in VB.NET. Let's just say, that this is a stress-test for the language. People say it's a bad language, but let's see how well it can handle something as big as this.
Basically, what he had in mind was just the skinning. What I plan on doing, is multiple Desktop Environments, notably the Basic Window Manager, and the Memphis Desktop Environment. I'm also going to make it possible for users to create their very own applications, using the many APIs, functions, templates and more, to be used in-game.
I'm also going to introduce a hidden network in the game: The Shiftnet. In OSFirstTimer's version, he had VB just move panels around showing different sites. This made it impossible for users to host their own sites... kinda defeats the purpose of a network, eh? What I want to do, is make it possible for users to create, and host their own Shiftnet sites. So far, this has been successful with a special implementation of HTML, called STML. STML stands for the "Shiftnet Text Markup Language".
If everything's so happy-go-lucky right now, then why are you posting here?
Well, I never did say that everything was happy-go-lucky... only the Shiftnet is... The community is very small, and most are leaving due to... well, I couldn't tell you, to be honest. Some are leaving because VB sucks, some are leaving because I'm a "bad coder", some are leaving because of the lack of features.
So, I'm sure some of you guys could help out the project. It doesn't matter if you know VB. even playing the game, and giving feedback and ideas for new features helps out a lot.
If you do know VB, the game is open-source so if you do want to contribute, you can.
Anyways, if you're interested in the project, head to http://www.shiftosnext.ml/forum/ to learn more, or to http://www.shiftos.net/ to check out OSFirstTimer's project. Note that the game's gone through many developers... OSFirstTimer was the first, though.
Anyways, happy shifting, future Shifters! <3
