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Vladimir Nabokov

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The precise but flawed graphics of my Worms puzzle game - Click to download the game
 
 
     

Unfinished Worms puzzle game

Despite its title, this prohject has nothing to do with the famous and highly successful team fighting game. It was a work-in-progress appelation for the poject that followed Trooper I, using the graphics engine that was a hybrid of my own developing ideas and an external system that made use of teh memory in the graphics card to give up to four MCGA screens that could be accessed and drawn on. Although this relieved some of the memory issues that confused the development of Trooper I, the interface was alittle tricky to use, and the repeated system invocations tended to produce slow and buggy code. However, I persevered, and using the new image compiler and compressor constructed a simple, but clearly defined and brightly coloured, graphical engine, which I planned to use in a block-based puzzle game. After this point the code seemed to baloon as I added more and more complex variants of the movement and puzzle engine, and it got to the stage where to solve a simple bug; such as the blocks failing to fall against the ones below but hovering a pixel above; required such a specific rearrangement of the game engine as to become nearly impossible. I later identitified the general problem with the code as being the specificity of it; a general engine such as used in Trooper II was much simpler to debug, due to its immediate compatibility with level variants. The Worms game, bounded as it is to a single screen, and using a small array of graphics and simple premise, initially appeared as if it could be constructed using the more specific class of engine, as was used exclusively in Trooper I. The wider aspirations I had for the game, and my hazy visualisation of its final application, forced me to use a mixture of the two programming approaches, resulating in chaotic source code, continually confused versions, and multiple code devices in conflict with one another. Eventually I found it was consuming too much of my free time, and had outgrown its initial application as a testing ground for my nascent graphics units, and so I abandoned the project, not without a little remorse. Despite all its failings, the Worms graphics engine was the neatest, fastest, and most advanced I had made at the time, and was correspondingly attractive. The source code for the graphics engine is informative and unconventional, and there are several inactivated game engine varients included in the source code. Enjoy this example of my early efforts; feel free to use any of the graphics or code for your own purposes. The download includes the compiled demo and graphics libraries, as well as original images and full source code.

Download the Worms demo (19 Kb, zipped) | Back to Graphical Trinkets

 
 
Letters from Terra | Updated 15th December 2004 | By Jonathan Ayling