Bruce Willis Rides Again

#OneGameAMonth, game 1.

I signed up to #OneGameAMonth (I’m not sure why it has to be a hash-tag) because I thought it would be fun, although in retrospect it’s probably just because I’m mad. Making even very simple games takes a surprising amount of effort; most of my free time in January was dedicated to this. What do you get for a month of work (about 63KB of C++; most of the engine was already written)?

This:

You are Bruce Willis, and must protect the world from incoming asteroids!

You can download the game here (1MB ZIP).

It’s Windows only (sorry, re-writing the engine would be a pain), and requires OpenAL, Visual C++ 2008 runtimes and DirectX; see the Readme.txt for more info, and also details of where the sounds and graphics (which mostly weren’t by me, and are why it looks so much better than the original screenshot posted on Twitter last week) were acquired.

Hardware-wise it should run on pretty much any PC with Windows XP or better and a screen resolution of at least 800×600 pixels. My desktop runs it at about 1,000 frames per second, despite its single thread calling sleep(1) in the main loop. Modern hardware is insane. My Core2, Intel graphics laptop manages three hundred or so.

I had the idea for the game – an Asteroids clone, but with physics instead of guns – quite a while ago, but this is it only just coming to fruition. I wondered if it would turn out to be fun, and I think it is. I’d originally envisioned a grappling-hook type tool that would let you tie asteroids together, but there wasn’t time to implement it (and physics is hard), and I’m not sure it’d really work with such a zoomed-out viewpoint anyway.

It has at least three bugs. See if you can spot them all!

Next month I’m going to play with Python on the Raspberry Pi I got for Christmas, so hopefully there will be something to show for that. Probably won’t be terribly impressive, but maybe it’ll be a bit of reminiscing for writing BBC BASIC games in the interpreter on school’s old Mac LCs and our own Acorn Electron. Tankies 3, anyone?