Now imagine them deflecting off each other...

Three player goodness

Asteroids with a twist - the big chunks of rock bounce off each other. Also has four-way multiplayer and a selection of ships and pilots to choose from.

Language: C++

Status: Functional. Lots of placeholder art, missing options screen and highscores, wonky ship/pilot balance... but the actual game works fine!

I'm not sure there's much I can say about this, but I'll give it my best shot...

Coding up my own crude little GUI for Imbroglio made me want to clean it up and make a proper job of it. This "project" promptly turned into a full-blown back-end that I intended to use for my C++ games, to handle those boring tasks like rendering text, handling sprite animation, capturing user input and so on. Having written something vaguely usable, I thought it would be a good idea to write a simple game to test it out and make sure that everything worked and was reasonably easy to use, so I decided to pick a simple game and try to implement it as a quick demo.

So... I picked Asteroids. I decided to make it support four players at once in order to test all the key- and gamepad-input handler code I'd spent some time coding up, although heaven knows how frantic the game would get with 4 people playing at once. I also added a console to make sure that the scripting hooks I'd written were all behaving properly, even though Asteroids doesn't really have a whole lot of need for scripts. It was all a bit excessive.

There are a bunch of different ships and pilots that players can choose from at the start of the game; choice of ship determines the player's basic weapon and movement speed, and then the pilot adjusts this slightly and provides a unique special ability. For example, one of the ships has a shotgun-style attack, while another has a powerful but slow-firing weapon that cuts through a line of asteroids; one of the pilots speeds up ship movement and adds a retro-booster, while another adds a slowdown effect to the ship's weapon.

After all that effort, I never did actually finish writing the game. Similarly to Imbroglio, it mostly works, it's just missing quite a bit of content - in this case, even though there are 4 ships and 4 pilots for the players to choose from, most of them don't have any individual graphics. The placeholder asteroids look pretty awful too! Also, the balance is way off in that some of the ships and pilots are much better than others; in particular, I seem to recall that one of the ships or pilots gave complete immunity to the smallest asteroids, which made surviving considerably easier.

As with Imbroglio, I'm providing the unfinished version of the game here. However, everything here is considerably rougher than Imbroglio, with lots of debug info still being drawn on the screen. There might be some weird bugs lurking around, although I couldn't see any while playing it recently. So saying, the options screen and highscores don't work, and I can't remember all of the keys. Good luck!

Download unfinished "demo" version (Windows only)

Placeholder graphics taken from the original game

Monsters explode in a shower of claret

Originally intended to be a darker version of Mr Do for submission to Retro Remakes competition, but the game never really got off the ground.

Language: C++

Status: Decidedly incomplete. Most of the basics work, although the collision detection between monsters and players is disabled for testing purposes.

This remake is based on Mr. Do, an old arcade game where the player would dig tunnels, collect cherries and attempt to squash monsters underneath gigantic apples. Part of me wonders what Sigmund Freud would have made of all that.

As with my Asteroids remake before it, this was written using C++. It was intended to be a quick project to serve a couple of purposes. First, there was a competition for games inspired by old arcade games, albeit with extra accessibility features added to make them easier for some people to play, so the idea was to use this for that. Second, I wanted to try out a different library (ClanLib) for game-related stuff. I also used it as an opportunity to try out a new IDE and some new coding techniques.

The core game mostly works, although there is only one level layout (taken from the first level of the original Mr. Do) and a couple of features are missing (collision detection between monsters and players, for example, although I think I disabled that intentionally for testing purposes). The monster behaviour is a little odd sometimes, but basically they work as they should, roaming around and using an A* algorith to figure out the best route to catch the player. The basic walkers will turn into diggers if they get stuck for too long, which prevents the player from hiding in a dead end. The alpha monsters will run away from the player if they have their throwing weapon available, otherwise they give chase.

There is a two player feature, although I'm not sure what the controls for the second player are... if indeed there are any!

I've provided the unfinished version here for download, although it probably isn't good for anything beyond a few seconds of mindless entertainment. At least the monsters explode fairly amusingly. Otherwise, you'd probably be better off playing the original game, although whether or not there is a decent PC-based version around is another matter.

Download unfinished "demo" version (Windows only)