dev, computing and games

This game was a team effort with myself and 4 other students, for a contest called Games4Girls. The contest is run by University of Illinois. The objective is to make a 2D game, of any kind, targeted toward a female highschool-age demographic, with the restriction that we use Game Maker. Game Maker is a proprietary program used for scripting 2D games, using a C-like language. The choice of Game Maker had something to do with problems with past entries that depended on a wide assortment of platforms/runtimes. Many games wouldn't run. So, they ruled that all entries had to use Game Maker.

We decided to make a platformer type of game, which is familiar to most people. The player controls a character named Alessa, and uses her various weapons to defeat enemies and move through the levels.

Because there were restrictions on using copyrighted content, we created all the graphics and music ourselves.

My personal role was

  • coding object collisions
  • coding scene transitions, scoring
  • creating sprite and background graphics and getting them into the game

Overall the project was a lot of fun to work on. As it turned out, our entry was very well-recieved and we finished in first place. We won a cash prize for our team and some money donated to our CS faculty at University of Waterloo.

https://info.uwaterloo.ca/www/profiles/research_profiles/profile-archive.php?id=193

The levels contain various enemies and obstacles.

The game includes some dialogue segments, illustrated by our group, with larger character graphics illustrated by my super-artistically-inclined groupmate! The dialogue provides some story background to the game.

Controls:

  • Left/right arrows: move Alessa
  • Up arrow: Jump
  • Any arrow(in water): swim
  • A key: Shoot an arrow
  • S key: Swing a sword

My team consisted of (big thanks to my teammates!):

Download Win32 binary

The game was originally built and tested on a Windows 7 environment.

Notes for running on Windows 10 and later:

  • Windows may mark the game executable as protected by SmartScreen. Although anything downloaded here is at your own risk, I attest that we did not put malware into the game and do not distribute it knowingly with any malware. To proceed past the SmartScreen filter should you choose to do so click "More Info" and "Run".
  • The Game Maker environment relies on DirectPlay which, from Windows 7 to 10, was changed from a built-in feature of the OS into an optional component which is downloaded on demand. If Windows prompts you to download it, choose Yes to proceed with downloading it and enable playing the game.
June 18th, 2010 at 3:00 pm | Comments & Trackbacks (0) | Permalink

This is a game of Tetris written in x86 assembly, in a personal effort to learn more about the instruction set. It uses mode 13h for all drawing, writing directly to address 0xA000 to plot. The index written for each pixel determines the color in a 256-indexed color palette.

It uses DOS interrupts for other functionality like random number generation, and keyboard interaction. For random numbers, it uses the modulus of the current system time. The game keeps going until pieces reach the top of the screen.

The keys i,j,k, and l (or arrow keys for the Win32 version) are used to move the pieces.

In the normal way, rows are cleared when pieces occupy the entire row with no holes.

The form of each 'tetrad' (piece) is hardcoded at the top of the source file, and used for drawing the grid and checking for collisions. The walls of the game are fixed. An array called 'predict' is used to foreshadow where the user is trying to move the tetrad, so that it cannot be moved through a wall or other landed pieces.

After every 'tick' of the game, the current tetrad in play is moved down by one square if possible, or committed to the grid if there are other pieces blocking the way. The game determines the timing using an interrupt, and advances the game after 10 time units, which is around every half a second.

Download binary (DOS com executable)

The source code was assembled using the A86 assembler.

View Source File

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Update (5/14/2018): Since the time of writing and building this program, the binary has rotted 🙁

However, I ported the code to Win32 with GDI and built it as a 32-bit PE executable.

Here's the newly updated Windows version:

Download binary (32-bit Windows executable)

The Win32 source code was assembled using MASM.

View Source File or Download Visual Studio 2018 Project (zip)

The Windows version also has the following changes:

  • Different colors for the different pieces
  • Fixed a bug where rows would sometimes not get cleared correctly
  • Added a 'next piece' UI
  • When you get game over instead of crashing it displays a message and you can press Escape to start again

Besides i,j,k,l you can also use the arrow keys.

November 15th, 2006 at 4:04 pm | Comments & Trackbacks (0) | Permalink