Faculty

or Not in Control of your Faculty was my next major project after Trooper I, and was inspired by the sudden confidence and power I experienced when manipulating images in MCGA. Like many of my games, the very basic game engine was designed first, partly in experiment and partly for my own enjoyment. In this case, a series of images would scroll onto the screen, by having a larger and larger portion of them displayed. The natural progression was to use pictures of teachers from my school I purloined from the school website, and to superimpose them onto an (admittadly almost unrecognisable) background of the school buildings. I found it inordinately amsuing at the time to design a mouse based system to shoot them, but didn't have the heart to splatter some of my favorite teachers (Mr Browne included) with blood as I had originally planned, and so resolved to using small gray holes that gave the images the appearance of paper targets. The game engine is ridiculously complex for something that carries out so specialised a task; and far as I can recall, this was my first attempt to write an entirely generalised game engine and feed it data hard-wired into the pascal constants. Due to this the engine was originally extremely buggy, and I remember I put a great deal of effort into smoothing it out to a respectable degree and writing reams of entirely unnecessary but unfailingly witty menu screens, as well as some hastily coobled together "super" weapons, so I could attempt to peddle it on my new web site. Despite its obvious appeal to those more antipathetic to the faculty of my school than I am, being me usual benevolent self, Faculty never really caught on, and I could never manage to procure quite enough images to make it more than an amusing distraction. The mouse control is something I was proud of at the time, however, and the generalised game engine for my next step towards my masterpiece, Trooper II. It has been suggeted to me on several occasions that I should allow the user to edit the images used, and employ their own, but the though of attempting to write fool-proof instructions on the conversion of 24-bit true colour high res compressed jpeg images to 8 bit raw images with palette conversion produces a similar reaction in me having me teeth pulled, and anyway, the project is closed now. Faculty, the source code and all the images are available for download below. The game should work well on most machines, and has a fairly relaible timer system for controlling the rate of the game engine, and smoothness of popup. Enjoy it, Jon

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