Past Gaming Projects

Mega Monkey Mayhem is a fast-paced monkey bomb battle. Scour the battlefield for powerups to improve your monkey’s abilities and arsenal. Attack other players by throwing bombs and catching them with the explosions. Use the terrain to your advantage to strike at enemies below. But watch out for contagious jungle viruses that make your monkey sick!

This project was built by a large team as a university project of 4 developers and 10 artists with myself as lead. It was submitted to the Independent Games Festival 2004 Student Showcase.

Action RPG game done for a 10 week 3d game dev course in 2003, not complete. A team effort with 4 programmers and 2 artists.

Arcade game done for 10 week 2D game programming class project in 2002-2003, a team effort with 3 developers. We managed to complete the project.

Itana is a multiplayer only 2D space shooter. In some ways the game is like Star Control 2 Melee, in the way that you control a single ship, and ships have special abilities. I never got very far with this game, but the networking code worked and formed the basis for my later game networking engine (GNE). I did the programming and others did the main art assets.

I saw a shareware Tron/Lightcycles clone on my friend’s mac one night at the college dorm that cost something like $10-$15, and it was horrible. You couldn’t change your controls or play 2-player unless you registered, and the computer opponent looked like he was moving around the board randomly, stopping only when he might hit himself. I said I could do better than that in half an hour for free and I did do that (although with no polish at all) – but then we got out of hand, adding whatever came to our minds – exploding mortar shells, wacky colored worms, worm sound effects for each worm, and support for an infinite number of (local) players using keyboard, mouse, and joystick, although 3+ people crammed on 1 keyboard is… interesting. I decided to release it and slapped on a good GUI frontend to customize and save your characters and view their lifelong scores. In all it was a 2-weekend project that I called “complete”.

Project V2143 is a tank fighter game I started after I realized how much of a mess I made of the JetFight code, my first game. I wanted to keep this one simple so I could finish it but made it a little too complex so it was not finished. Most of the effort was on the map editor and GUI, so it’s mostly just a game engine. The map editor has many functions and a help system, and is fully-featured (dragging, editing, menu system, right click popups, automatic terrain editor).

I did the programming and some of the art, but most of the art, the music, and plot were done by others.

• StarSaver - 1998-03-27 - 3D stars screensaver with MIDI background music
• Shipdriv - 1998-04-18 - drive a spaceship around with guns, engines, and stereo sound
• JetFight - 1998-12-03 - My first “big project” with 2D game engine, scrolling terrain, sound effects, map editor. Source code only, no binary or assets.
• Snow - 1999-01-11 - screensaver with falling show

This is a game I made last century, but it is the best program I ever wrote with Pascal, the second programming language I could write in (after Q/QuickBASIC). It’s got ASCII graphics effects such as formatting, text windows, screen scrolling, as well as a good example of a sound effects engine using the old built-in PC speaker (cards hitting table and text typing). I played it right before I uploaded was surprised at how fun the game was despite being small and text-based.

You should totally download this masterpiece (DOS EXE and source code) from a time when a compiled game was 12 kb without compression. I’m not sure how to run it, but let me know if you get it working in some VM. The sound effects require real-time speaker control which may be hard to emulate in a modern VM running in a multitasking OS.