Game 1

Game Play

Goal: Collect all the books then get to the exit (the door).

Keys:

  • /: Movement
  • Space: Jump
  • Enter: Shoot (when picked up purple potion)

About

Before widespread internet access, or my knowledge of source control, any code I wrote was stuck on a particular machine. I could use floppies to move them around, but blank floppies were not always available to me. This meant I was limited to working on the programs that were on the machines I had access to. But that’s could be a good thing sometimes. If all you had to work on was the programs you can touch, you find yourself working on them because you had no choice.

Yes, I might be rambling a bit.

This is yet another platformer, but I think the reason why this one exists at all is because I started writing it when I was visiting my grandparents in Castlemaine. They had a computer which ran Windows 3.1 — for a long while actually — and it had a few interesting games there that we played when we went up there for the weekend. But there was also DOS and QBasic installed, and I took the opportunity to use it to make this game.

It would be a few years before this became more than just first screen of the first level, but I got inspired by something — I can’t remember what — and thought it would be a good one to develop further. I think I came up with a backstory for it as well: you, just a regular person, have been recruited by a wizard to collect his lost spell books by his rival. Yeah, okay. Pretty generic. But it did force me to come up with some artwork I’d never consider. And that creative direction did help with making the levels a bit more consistent than they would’ve been.

Anyway, not much more to say about this one. And no, I never came up with a better name for it.