The Amiga was nearing the end of its life cycle and my local Game store was slowly getting rid of its Amiga stuff. It was sad to find all your favourite games crammed into that little corner of the store where only the geekiest kids would huddle.
Then one day, I spotted a bright blue stripy box.
"Blitz 2.0!???
Oooh!
I'd been using AMOS ever since I got it free on an Amiga Format coverdisk, but this was finally a chance to buy a fully fledged programming language.
I whipped it up.
.. I say that. I saved up for the rest of the week, THEN I whipped it up!

-=-=-

Blitz Basic 2.0 came with a nice juicy manual (/binder!) and I had a nice time reading through it all.
I wrote a couple of little utilities with the language, like nice GUI based game loaders, and silly little things like that, but for most of my remaining Amiga time, I actually found myself sticking to AMOS. I'd grown comfortable with it.

Fast forward to a few years later, and Blitz2D came free on a PCPlus Cover DVD.
I joined the BlitzCoder forums (my first forum experience) and learned the ropes.
Blitz2D was fantastic!
After a couple of years, I got given Blitz3D at Xmas, and fairly quickly learned that my 3D skills were a bit pants!
As time progressed, so did Blitz, and soon BlitzMax appeared. BlitzMax had a significantly different syntax, as well as a mountain of bugs and issues when compared to Blitz3D.

I gave it time to grow, and grow it did. When I finally made the big switch to BlitzMax, I found it to be a wonderfully complex language, capable of making my crappy little games run a little smoother, as well as giving me the opportunity to have them run on Mac and Linux systems.

I've spent the past couple of years digging into BlitzMax, making a bundle of silly little games, and getting used to its ways.
But at the same time, I also got into iOS development.
For iOS development, I found a great language/framework called Cocos2D, which attempts to make Obj-C a little more usable. For the most part, it does a fantastic job of it.

But then I wrote NeonPlat Adventures.
Over the course of two months, I built one of my biggest games EVER! I drew and animated over 50 characters, and even got a fully working calendar system to keep track of player's scores, and games.
A HUGE game, but enjoyable to code.
And then came the iOS port.

Having to convert such a huge game, line by line, piece by piece, from BlitzMax to Cocos2D drove me bonkers!!
Having to then reconstruct a calendar system, whilst sticking to iOS and Cocos2D's limitations, was NOT a pleasant experience. I did NOT have fun remaking this game!
Two months in, and about a third of the way there, with around about 30 or so of the characters yet to be rewritten, I gave up.
I'd had enough.
I love writing games.. Redoing the same thing all over again is NOT fun!!

Which brings us to Monkey.
Monkey lets me write games on my PC, have them run in Windows, then carry the sourcecode over to the Mac, where I can hit ONE BUTTON I order to have it run on iOS.
The same sourcecode also works for Android, Mac and HTML5 games, too.
It's such a huge advantage not having to keep writing, and rewriting things, for various devices and systems.

I've been using Monkey since about mid-December. I spent most of January building a reusable framework, and have since released six freeware games for Windows and Android systems.
I've also used Monkey to create two iOS games, both of which are already available in the AppStore! (C3ntipong and SpikeDislike2

In less than three months, I've gone from struggling with my own sanity, to having a fantastic world of game making, right at my fingertips.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Mark Sibly for his amazing work, through the years, on all the Blitz languages in its various forms.
If it weren't for his wonderful languages, AGameAWeek would be even shitter than it already is!