After seeing Stwelin's thread on his uber-list of unfinished projects, I thought it'd be nice to start a thread to go a little more in-depth with that idea and encourage people to share nuggets of stuff which they abandoned, as well as sharing the reasons for their abandonment and their thoughts about those ideas or bits of code, in the hope that we can all learn something from them.
So, in the spirit of fairness I shall kick off the proceedings by allowing you into my closet o' shame and telling you about the PC compatible bric-a-brac you'll find within...
Boulder Dash engine - I've always loved the Boulderdash genre, even if I've also always been crap at it, but my mate James is a genius at level design for them so I thought I'd have a go at writing an engine for it as it's an interesting programming exercise given the quirky physics in the game. I also wanted to make it so that actual movement in the game is pixel-based without changing the gameplay, which believe it or not actually caused me to scratch my head for a while before I realised how bloody obvious the solution was.
Use cursors to scroll, left mouse to place tile, right mouse to grab tile and mouse scroll wheel to change selected tile.
http://www.drderekdoctors.com/bdash.rarCannon Fodder testbed - Ah, another abandoned game. I got it into my head that I really wanted to remake Cannon Fodder but set it in a fictional version of the second world war much like the one that Return To Castle Wolfenstein occupied. This was partly because I loves me some zombies and also because I wanted to call the game Cannon Fuhrer and I'm a sucker for a good title. Anyway, this testbed just shows the simple click to move interface and was written to test out doing a highmap within a 2D tileset properly rather than in the fake Zelda fashion, and to even fold a little inertia into it to allow cool vehicle jumping rather than the very canned version you see in Cannon Fodder.
Click the mouse to attract the pixel to it, just done to show velocity and stuff and tile heightmap.
http://www.drderekdoctors.com/cannonfodder.rarKitty Hawk test demo - Back in the old days of using Blitz BASIC I started on the long-delayed project of Kitty Hawk (which - now that I've just finished Wizball - will be my next project) using a horribly proprietary and bespoke editor to script the enemy waves and behaviours. This is the result of those early tests. It will give you the fear!
NB. It's really not indicative of the design and quality of the genuine Kitty Hawk game.
Use cursors to move, CTRL to fire, 1-5 to select weapon power and F1-F4 to select weapon. Hectic and crap.
http://www.drderekdoctors.com/kh005.rarMunchies Maze Logic Demo - This is a Pacman path-finding logic demo I wrote to demonstrate to a friend how to do Pacman-style path-finding without actually doing any real pathfinding.
use the mouse to move the point to which the Ghost will home.
http://www.drderekdoctors.com/munchies_logic_demo.rarSplit Personalities Demo - Spit Personalities is just about one of my favourite games ever on the ZX Spectrum and it's one that I've always wanted to remake but it's always fallen at the first hurdle due to the need for the honkingly massive graphics which form the levels. But over the years I've started the project about 3 times, and this is the last one back from the Blitz BASIC days and it translates the original keyboard control to the mouse very nicely and in fact plays a pretty decent game.
Mouse to move, left click and then drag-off of a tile to throw it. Click on the box at the top left to spew tiles into the rink.
http://www.drderekdoctors.com/splitpersonalities.rarTumbleblock test - This was a test bit of code in order to see if you could deal with massive amounts of collisions between solid objects without exponentially chugging the crap out of your engine. As such it uses a tilemap, except each tile also contains an offset value on both axis of between 0 and tilesize-1, which localises the collisions massively. Effectively it's like a bucket-sort and it was an interesting programming exercise.
Use left-click to drop a block, middle-mouse to cause "explosion", right-click to delete a block.
http://www.drderekdoctors.com/tumbleblock.rarThe Ultimate Platform Engine - Except it's not. It's actually a fairly crappy collision system except it allowed for slopes and was the genesis of how I do tile collisions these days. One "nice" thing is that it was the start of my trend towards data-driven engines.
Controls are QZOPS if I recall.
http://www.drderekdoctors.com/upe.rarVerlet Physics demonstration - This just shows a basic verlet integration physics demo using balls. Left-click to make a ball, right click to start/end a new line. Middle mouse to continue a line you've started and delete to delete the last created line. It's not totally unstable and was the beginnings of the below Vector Tile program.
Left-click to make a ball, right click to start/end a new line. Middle mouse to continue a line and delete to delete the last created line.
http://www.drderekdoctors.com/verlet3.rarVector Tile - This is the precursor to Retrengine before I realised that physics and platformers don't mix in the way I wanted, as it was all a bit too spongy for my tastes. The engine is totally data driven and the physics was pretty stable by this juncture, even if it was very primitive in it's abilities.
SHIFT-leftclick to spawn a man at the cursor and just left-click to spawn barrels. QZOP controls I think. The camera will follow first entity created.
http://www.drderekdoctors.com/vectortile.rar
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