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Welcome to the Glider PRO wiki!

Glider PRO was the commercial sequel to Glider 4.0, written by John Calhoun and published by Casady & Greene, Inc. It was a Macintosh game from the 1990's, written in C and compiled "fat" for both 68K and Power PC Macintoshs. I believe the CodeWarrior IDE was used. But tools like CodeWarrior (for the project) and ResEdit (for opening the .rsrc files) have long stopped working on modern Macs....

When developing Glider PRO I had several goals. One was to expand the world of the game — allow the paper glider to go outside for example. I think Glider was feeling a bit claustrophobic to me — it felt a bit confining always wandering from room to room in this seemingly infinite house. In Glider PRO you could now fly out windows, over rooftops, etc.

Another thing I wanted to do was to take advantage of the larger color displays for the Macintosh. While I still had a fixed "room size" I made an effort to try and show rooms preceding, following, above and below the room the player was in. On a large enough display you could see nearly nine rooms. I think that might have worked out pretty well — perhaps even attenuating the claustrophobia a bit?

And of course I added new objects the player could interact with. More "power-ups", etc.

I also removed the timed element from the original Glider. That is, there was no bonus for traversing a room quickly; no penalty for doing it slowly. The clocks in the game, that had at one time acted to subtract from your time, now simply became bonus points for seemingly no reason.

Also the very goal of escaping the house was gone with Glider PRO (since of course flying outside might merely be just part of the journey). With escape no longer the indicator that you had completed the game, I had to add ... something. And so I introduced magical stars. They would be sprinkled throughout a house and you completed the house (the game) when you collected all the stars.

I was more comfortable with reading and writing more complicated file types, so with Glider PRO I didn't have arbitrary limits on the number of rooms in a "house" or the number of objects in a room. In Glider 4 I believe the houses were limited to 40 rooms and the rooms limited to 15 or 16 objects.

Also more complicated, objects in one room could toggle the state of an object in another. So a switch in one room might toggle on or off a paper shredder two flights up. This allowed more complicated "puzzles" to be created.

All told though, I felt after a time that Glider PRO had maybe departed a bit too much from the original sprit of the game (whatever that was). Maybe the glider was supposed to just meander through an endless house — maybe moving outside was a bad idea. So when I entertained bringing Glider to iOS (the iPhone, iPad) I decided not to just do a straight port of Glider PRO — or even Glider 4 for that matter. While Glider 4 was closer to the spirit of Glider, there were some cool things in Glider PRO to harvest as well. The latest Glider then (now on Mac OS X as well), though not a faithful port that some players wanted, strikes in my mind a good balance between Glider 4 and Glider PRO.

And talking about the evolution of Glider, for better or worse I was able in the latest incarnation to scroll the house in real-time as the glider moves along — something that required more graphical horsepower than I could count on in the early Macintosh days. I should say though that when I decided to make the recent Glider a side-scroller, it again changed the dynamics of the game to some degree. Now there are no real room demarcations. Instead I decided to treat the "floor" of a house as the demarcation — as a "level" so to speak (even with something like a "boss" at the end, just before the inevitable staircase that leads you onward and upward).