Jim Dramis

Jim Dramis

Jim Dramis was a computer programmer for Texas Instruments (TI) programming some of the most memorable video games for the computer including Car Wars, Munch Man, and Parsec.

Interview

The following is from an interview done by Gary M. Kaplan that appeared in the January 1983 issue of 99'er Magazine, page 26 - 27:

An Interview with Jim Dramis - Game Designer and Programmer Extraordinaire

Background

Jim Dramis, a 32-year-old programmer with Texas Instruments, is not the kind of person who you'd picture as a whiz-bang arcade game designer. As a former high school math teacher and insurance agent, the mild-mannered Dramis was far removed from the fantasy world of space ships, lasers, racing cars, and hungry video creatures. An Ohioan by birth, he completed his B.S. in mathematics at Kent State University and went on to a brief stint as a manufacturing supervisor at TI. From there, Dramis worked for a couple of years as a special agent for an insurance company. After another two-year Interlude, 1979 found him back at TI, this time working as a programmer analyst on minicomputers being used for the calculator and watch repair system. From this support environment, Dramis transferred to TI's Consumer Products Group, where he got involved in some Extended BASIC educational software development. But it wasn't until a year-and-a-half ago, when he started work on his first game, Car Wars, that Dramis began to explore his real creative potential - as evidenced by follow-up work with Munch Man, and the new TI smash hit, Parsec.

Questions and Answers

GMK: What influence does your mathematics background have on your present work as a game designer and programmer?

JD: I think that the logic and thought process that one develops in going through the rigors of mathematics certainly does help in game design and the programming of computers. They seem to go hand in hand.

GMK: What about your experience as a teacher?

JD: My teaching experience has helped me instruct other programmers here at TI. In designing the games, the educational background helps to a certain degree, because I'm constantly thinking, "How is the audience going to perceive what I'm doing?" You try not to make the game too complex, but rather interesting and a good experience.

GMK: How do you feel about games as a form of entertainment and enrichment?

JD: Well, I think games add more to your enrichment and learning than just hand-eye coordination and skills. We're just now starting to observe the effect of game playing on the entire learning and educational process. Motivation and involvement have a lot to do with it.

GMK: How do you feel about yourself playing games all day for a living. . . and what about the children who play your games?

JD: Actually it might sound kind of funny, but to me, writing the game is more fun than sitting down and playing it for hours. There's a lot more that goes into designing a game then meets the eye. As for children, there was one girl I was talking to who told me she played Munch Man hours each day and scored 294,000 points. It's a good feeling to know that someone out there likes the product that you've created.

GMK: Did you play a lot of games as a child?

JD: I played cards a lot. Board games too. This interest and intrigue with numbers and logic from an early age might have contributed to my interest in games. I think that - especially in the environment that I'm working in-is in­teresting because you're trying to push the machine at its ultimate limits. You're trying to muster everything graphically, speed-wise, logic-wise - out of the machine that you possibly can. The limit there sometimes is just the limit of the programmer's imagination and skills. It's pretty challenging.

GMK: Is the process of designing a game a game in itself?

JD: Yes, there's a certain ten­sion, a certain risk-reward, and there's a goal. Son1c of these key elements you find in the ac­tual game that you produce - you have a certain tension about doing a game because in your mind there are four or five ob­stacles that you know have to be overcome, and you're not sure you can; it's kind of exciting each day - you never know, how far you're going to get. There's a certain risk because you could spend six months on a project, and it could very easily be a total disaster. Sometimes there's a fine line between a great game and a total wipe-out. There's al­so a goal - finishing the proj­ect - that means making sure it is a marketable, bug-free prod­uct. So you're right - there is a game in creating games.

GMK: How much of Car Wars and Munch Man did you actually do?

JD: Car Wars and Munch Man were basically my own - games that I was responsible for and did the programming on. Car Wars, my first game, was one GROM; that was all programmed in GPL. Prior to actually starting work on the game, I attended GPL classes here and took a couple of weeks just to familiarize myself with the GPL manual and the architecture of the Home Computer. Basically I learned the GPL language by doing the programming for Car Wars. Similarly, with Munch Man, I learned 9900 code [Assenbly Language].

GMK: Can you give us an account of evolution of Car Wars from idea to finished program?

JD: In a lot of these games, we don't just go off in a corner and dream them up. We get good suggestions, help, and ideas from a lot of different people - even systems programmers on how to improve or write a subroutine. I had the basic game design idea, and the first thing I wanted to make sure was that GPL had enough speed to handle the motion, or whether I would have to use automotion. In this program, I did not use automotion of sprites. Those cars are double-sized, magnified sprites. I moved them one, two and four-pixel increments myself.

One of the main problems in the game was the logic. For instance, the track has all different characters that tell me whether the car can turn left, right, or change lanes. Once I got that programmed and working well, the rest of the game was really just polishing up - making the track look better, adding scoring and color, extra computer cars, etc. The whole effort took two and a half to three months of programming.