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) |
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Trinkets