PARALAKS

At the begginning of my first year in highschool, I already had a few gaming magazines piled up and i always wanted to be the writer of one instead of the reader. I even sent emails to some of the magazines but as you can guess they did not reply and the first building stones of PARALAKS was placed those days.

During the years following those days I made no attempts in this matter but while I was preparing for the university enterance exam I was also spending my free time reading some magazines and watching game reviews. One morning before even getting out of bed I saw the magazines I read and thought to myself “Why don't I try making one myself?”

PARALAKS

First few days I didnt talk about this to anybody, I just did some research. I am not going to bore you by telling the whole story but would love to publish a youtube about this topic.

Now lets get to why and how we chose the name PARALAKS. This was a painful process for me as I needed to find a fitting name and convice my teammates to use it. Because PARALAKS is a term used in gaming -and is frankly interesting- I was happy with it.

First I want to touch on its astronomical meaning before talking about its use in gaming. “Paralaks” (originally parallax) means “angle of distance”. Its used in astronomy to calculate the distance between celestial bodies. Its calculation is depended on geometry rather than physics and because of this it is the most ideal measurement method and evaluation tool, you can even try it from your home.

I bet we have all experienced this at least once since we were little. If we look at an object or our finger first with our right eye closed, then our left eye closed (or vice versa) it looks like the thing in front of our eyes has moved. If you know the distance between your eyes and measure the amount of displacement, you can calculate the distance of the object from your eyes. Of course, things tend to get more complicated when you are in space, but the parallax method can be roughly explained like this.

Now i want to talk about the how parallax is used among the gaming community. We often dont see the word parallax on its own, rather its used as a phrase. “Parallax Scrolling” is a technique that creates the illusion of depth, especially in 2D games, by making background images move slower than foreground images. Of course, it would be easier to explain this using a video. It was first used, though not exactly as it is today, in the game Jump Bug, released in June 1981. However, the first game to use the technique fully was Moon Patrol, released in 1982.

I didn’t want to bore the reader by making our first article too long, so I only talked about what PARALAKS means and our humble origin story. Lastly, I want to say I of course am not alone in this journey. The team behind this idea is not huge, we are just 5 students. We all have differences, some like to play indie games, some like to go achievement hunting, and some can’t play without getting into the technical parts. (Of course, we have many more traits, which you can find out by reading) But we all have a common goal. We are all chasing after a dream. We like to add our own spins on our reviews and give you some breathing space, away from the tiring pace of the day while entertaining you. You being with us through our journey will be our biggest motivation and source of happiness. We are just at the beginning of a long way and we are excited to see what we can achieve together..