After making Pacman 2000 during my second year, I chose to do another game as the subject of my computer science final year dissertation. I briefly considered a remake of Bubble Bobble (which would have been quite amusing but not necessarily very impressive to write about) before finally settling on doing a remake of Gauntlet, the popular Atari arcade game from the mid-eighties.
In Gauntlet, up to four players had to fight their way through an unlimited number of (randomly ordered, at least after the first few) levels. Monsters would block the players' progress, and monster generators would continue to spawn fresh monsters until they were themselves destroyed. The players also had to contend with various traps and other inconveniences, such as locked doors which required keys to pass. In many ways, Gauntlet can be considered the distant ancestor to dungeon-crawl games like Diablo.
Despite having most of the year to work on the game, and despite trying my best to put all of that time to the best possible use rather than leaving everything until the last minute, I ended up having to code most of the game in a marathon session during the Easter break. This was partly due to the fact that I broke a bone in my right hand just as coursework crunch-time was approaching, which made programming just a bit tricky.
As a result, the game ended up being a bit rushed, although it worked well enough to give a live demo during my final presentation (despite being warned of the dangers of doing such a thing - "if it's going to break, you can guarantee it will happen while you're giving a demo"). I got a fairly decent mark for it in all; I guess the game and the presentation must have been pretty good because my final write-up is quite painful to read now.
The name Metal Mittens came about thanks to the fact that I was aiming for a pretty daft, somewhat cutesy version of Gauntlet. The game itself was intended to be largely faithful to the original, albeit with support for only two players instead of the original four and with player health no longer dimishing over time. Most of the original monsters are represented in some fashion, though the grunts now seem to look like reindeer with boxing gloves, for some odd reason. Similarly, there are four characters for players to choose from, although they do not correspond perfectly with the original Gauntlet cast.
After my experiences with Java while writing Pacman 2000, I decided to try something different for Mittens. The game is written in a bit of a confused mish-mash of C and C++ (since I was in a hurry), with Allegro for input-handling and graphics and so on, and fmod for the music and sound effects. The game is not exactly wonderfully elegantly written and has a couple of minor bugs; the most notable is that there is no draw-order sorting of the monsters and players on the screen, so you'll occasionally witness bits of monsters infront of things they should be behind, and vice versa. Thankfully, since the game tends to be pretty hectic, this is unnoticeable for the most part... or it would be if I hadn't just drawn attention to it. Whoops.
I've tweaked the game a little since my final submission, mainly due to the fact that I lost some of the source code and ended up having to rewrite it in order to re-compile the game. I've adjusted the difficulty a little bit, and now rather than crashing when it runs out of levels to load it instead loops back to the start but becomes more difficult.
There is also a level editor, although it is not the most user-friendly thing in the world - I needed something quick and dirty that I could use, rather than something intuitive for other people. So saying, if anyone wants to play with it then it's there and it works, although I don't think anyone aside from me has bothered with it for long enough to make any levels (and I certainly didn't make very many either, which might be an indication of how "fun" I found it).
If you'd like to try the game out, download it below. To install the music, unpack the archive in the same location that you unpacked the game; the .it files should end up in the mittens/music subdirectory. In any case, the game will run perfectly happily without the music installed.