Bat out of Hell!

When the good folk over at B3ta wondered what it would be like if "Bat out of Hell" were made into a PC game I couldn't resist.

The Brief:
"Guide a pixelly bat out from, well, hell. Rendered 1980s bleepy Spectrum style."

I made this and was featured in B3ta Issue #277, which made me very happy indeed.

Not quite sure why I decided to use Java rather than Flash for this though, as it was a massive pain in just about every way.

Java has no native support for sensible file formats such as MP3 (ok, I know there is a patent issue here but OGG would have been fine!) The clever folk over at Sun instead provide their own format (.au), which fails to compress so spectacularly well that even an encounter with a quantum singularity would probably provide little better than a 3-4% reduction in its packed size.

And whilst we're Java bashing:

• Java is a real nightmare to deploy
• Java is slow to load
• The Java graphics engine appears to involve midgets and a crayon, painfully attempting to animate the screen in realtime.

There are some things that I could have done to improve performance. JOGL could have been used to provide hardware accelerated graphics, JLayer could have been used to provide MP3 playback, and the JNLPAppletLauncher seems to really help when deploying applets.

Anyway, if you're lucky enough to have Java setup in just the right way, there is a slim chance that below you'll see the game:



Controls: Left mouse button to fly upwards.

Want this game for you website or blog? Copy and paste the HTML code below:

<applet archive="http://www.rararadio.net/batHell.jar" code="Airplane" codebase="http://www.rararadio.net/batHell.jar" vspace="0" width="480" height="384" hspace="0"></applet>

My First Video Game : Fox!

Almost 10 years ago, when I was at school aged 14, me and my friend Stephen McAuley decided that we wanted to make a computer game. We were at Highworth Warneford School and at the time there was quite a community of geeks who'd spend their lunch hours writing games, demos, viruses and such. I doubt this is the case anymore, and the last I heard it was more about drugs and knife crime. It's funny to think that, at the time, I was considered one of the worse kids because I smoked and wrote a virus that infected the Acorn computer room, several local businesses, and a multinational bank. Smoking was unheard of.

Me and Steve both learnt to program in QuickBasic. I wouldn't recommend anybody start there now but at the time this was probably the beginners language of choice. I also knew quite a lot about assembly language (for a 14 year old anyway) and we made use of this to enable things like full screen parallax scrolling, sound blaster audio and some other pretty standard now, hard back then features.


Above: The Hidden Palace. Graphics for this level are from a set left over by the Sega team behind Sonic 2. The level never made it to the Sonic game, so we nicked their art :)


Above: The Reactor. This is another level from Fox that uses art sourced from the ill fated Sonic 4 game, scrapped in alpha.

Unfortunately, the game does not play nice with modern operating systems. It took a lot of tweaking for me to get it running properly in DOSBOX so as to make these videos. I think the problem is probably due to the games use of EMS memory.

PacMan Pixel Art

I know its been done to death, and I know the world could probably just get on by without another one; but I've decided to do it anyway. I'm making a PacMan clone. It's going to be Flash based but, with any luck, I'm going to try keeping the charm of the original version with some nice pixel art. The web versions I have seen so far seem to favour vector rendering of the maze and characters. This makes everything look really smooth and, to be honest, a little bit boring.


As you can see, I've already made a start on the artwork. If you're making your own version of this game and are looking for sprites then go ahead, take these. They were hand cranked pixel by pixel in Paint Shop Pro, and the logo was an old bitmap font I had sitting around. I didn't make the font myself and I'm afraid the PCX file didn't hold any info on who did.

And here is the classic PacMan maze.

I always mock up screen shots of the game I want to make before I start any code, that way I know what I'm making and it helps me avoid taking the little short cuts in a games development that have a cumulative effect in the end of making it all look crap.

I'll post some more info about this project once I have some code written. The AI is, from a programmers point of view, probably the most interesting thing about this game, and probably the reason it is cloned so often. I have a good idea about how I want to do this so I'll try and explain that another day.