Man, you're awesome guys
As I'm new on this forum I guess I'll complete my short introduction (i read the rules!) with my own abandonned works. I added lot of images so mods feel free to convert them to links if it's too much, i'm a noob here and i'm not sure where to stop exactly.
I'll skip my Basic and VB games, they were not verry interesting...
So, with a school friend we started to make a game 5 or 6 years from now that we called
NetRush. The game was an enhanced version of "
Hacker Pro", a VB game we made in wich you had a grid with two goals on each side, one for each player. You had to play with two computers with a specific shared document accessible on LAN. Yes we did'nt know anything about network code so we made it work with what we already knew : there was a file accessible on the "host" player computer that hold all the data about the game. It was quick and dirty but it worked!...Well only if you made a game that was not real time. So we as we wanted it real time we made it half-real-time-half-turn-based.
The game showed the grid, and a text entry. The grid showed the state of the "network", with Viruses (they were your basic units) and ennemy Viruses that you could see if they were near yours or on you territory. Each square was a symbolic for a server machine.
That's the interesting part : you had to type commands in the text entry to give orders...
So you typed "create virus killer" and next "move virus killer up" or something like that. This way, all the orders were saved but executed only each 30 seconds, all in the same time! And the refresh of the state of the game was made only each 15 seconds! (the game was reading at the shared game state file...)
...
Ok so it was a quick and dirty hardcore geek game but we had a lot of fun. (the music was verry good as it was the music of the Angel Attack in the 3 Computers in N.G.Evangelion, in the early episodes).
(nothing to show for this one as i don't have the code and exe anymore :/ )
Then, we started to look at C++ and DirectX to see if we could make something bigger...
Then the idea of
NetRush went in our head : it would play like a classic RTS game but was all about the hacking stuff. You see, the core idea of the game (as in Hacker Pro) was to break the control of the other player by sending him special Viruses called "bombs" or "ghost" that would have a special effect on the ennemy player UI directly!
So we made it, with an made-in editor. It works, we played until 4 players, but we had no time to really finish it and no time to make more than test maps (one is scripted).
Take you sunglasses, here are some young game programmer wanabe arts, most made with defaults PaintShopPro patterrns, in less than 10 minutes at the time (the intro menu was first a benchmark for the engine):
You can try it if you want BUT i warn you that it will burn your eyes and the text is in french AND most french players don't understand what's happening if i don't explain myself just before. The other thing is that the main feature of the game, the Viruses that attack player's UI, are not easily reacheable with the version i provide. It would be interesting to make a specific map to show that (like the BlueScreen virus XD) but the editor is not really not usable enough to make it fast so i guess you'll have to wait the new version (see farther in this text).
Here is the link
NetRushOk so it was a pretty good start technically, but on the design side (and graphic side) there were identifiable problems that we had time to analyze while having lot of exams.
The "game engine" (if you can call that like this) that we made for NetRush was our first and we had to learn Dx and C++ at the same time.
So we called it
"PainEngine" as it was painfull to write.
After NetRush i worked on a full 3D engine and one of the main feature i wanted was to have paged landscape like in Morrowind at the time.
I called it
"XPainEngine" : Extended Pain Engine. I guess you know why
So i made some useful code (the paging system worked and was scalable enough) but not a full engine. (note : those codes are not such useful now so i don't make them public, but if you ask i can provide it)
We had ideas about making a RPG at the time, but not a classical one. I created it's design as deep as exotic i could because we didn't want to be classical.
That game would have used the paging landscape system but i planned to make a specific module based engine for this one.
As the game system was inspired by Aurora (NeverWinter Nights), i called it...
...
Twilight!
The goal at that time was to have a powerful editor like them, but with lot less features because the game rules were really simpler than AD&D and were focused on the fact that those ruled would only run on a computer. (RPG on computer, IMOA, should be though with the computer helping, not against it)
The game background was named
"Terres De Glace" that you could translate by "Grounds of Ice" or "Frozen Grounds" or "Lands of Ice" i think.
It was localized on a banquise covered planet so almost all the ground was only ice.
In this world, there was no humans, only Hentydes. They were like humans but with no face and 4 eyes. They all wear masks, painted and having double expressions.
And there was "classes" that were like re-factored Hentydes.
The game itself, with the scenario, was called
"Dragon de Neden" that you would translate to "Neden's Dragon" , Neden being the name of the known world, and Dragon was the an unknown word for all the Hentydes... as the hero was having dreams about someone asking him to find the Dragon, it was an intersting start i think because there was no "Dragon" nor any aproaching word or concept for Dragon for all the Hentydes. All....but some of them having the same dream...
You can find all the artworks and other schems in this big (50Mo) rar file.Here are some raw pictures I made at the time. (Note : In the file, some folders have the name of the other artists that joined the project, the rough and dirty artworks were mine. Please, take a look at what Icaras did, it was amazing).
That project was really complex.
It was a big project but i had too much problems to manage the team and work at the same time on design and programmation so i had to stop the project 9 months after we started gathering people. :/ :/ TT__TT
I guess i'll get back to this project one day as it was not only deep and exotic, but not equaled to this day in the specific subtile images that i wanted to express in it (like the double expressions on the masks, the fact that everybody wears a mask, the depressing mood of the whole that i wanted, etc). That, my friends, was a complex but sublime expression of my own perception of society (and other things). You could call it art if it was finished.
The code was not enough to make it play but it's somewhere in a backup. Don't think it's useful so i don't make it public but you can ask if you want it.
After that, I didn't do anything for months (ok i did just one fanzine comic sold in festivals called
Life Turtle, currently in french but translation will comme soon if you're interested...).
Now, more than 2 years ago i worked on my programming skills a lot and later i started to work on a new version of NetRush. That version will have for goals to make the game playable by anyone, fix the design problems from the first version, rewrite the code as clean as i can to make it easy to work with on the long term (the original code was made by C/C++ aprentices...not reusable), and the main goal : make it sellable!
I think there is a verry good potential for this game (as far as i keep the direction of totally fantasy view of virtual network and as far as the background of the game is as "really broad geek culture" and open to the world (eclectic) as i can express it).
I'm currently working on it and hope to provide a basic core game playable version for the next IGF. So no "game" screen for instance, but i'll talk about it more later i guess
Ok i stop here with early adverts XD
Now that i showed my shameful uncompleted games, it's time to finish (to the really end) one
Developer
