Devolution is a 3D real-time-strategy game for Windows including a music track in 96 kilobyte. A playable demo was presented at Dusmania 2007 in the project competition and won the second prize.
The game is based on the code of our unfinished project Wastelands which is a 2D game. So the Devolution graphics engine is 3D but the game engine is still based on rastered 2D maps which was quite common for early 3D-RTS games.
The game was never finished, but we continue to work on it until 2009. There are later versions with features like day-night cylce for example.
The Windigo-Creation-Dojo is a tool to create procedural textures and 3D-models and was used to produce content for the game Devolution.
Procedural content creation means, that you combine a couple of parameterized filters and make usage of the behavior of pseudo-random but in actually reproducible numbers. This allows you, for example, to create huge and fine detailed textures without repetitions that only need a few dozen byte to be stored.
The basic approach to generate seemingly random content is pretty old. The famous game Elite from 1984, for example, generated a whole universe that way. Around 2000 there were very impressive PC demos using the procedural approach like fr-08: .the .product by Farbrausch which was a 64 kilobyte small demo showing stunning 3D scenes.
This game was our contribution to the Dusmania 9.0 overnight coding-congtest (see Events).
It's a quite more complicated Tetris clone. You have 3 playfields that can be rotated, which offers a lot more possibilies and headaches.To speed things up, all particiopants where provided with a game engine called HGE and a library of graphics.
There are two version. The first one created and presented at Dusmania is called Wheeltris. A second one created later whith revised graphics was called Rotox. No version has been released.
This game is a remake of the C64 game 'Microprose Soccer'. Started at the ZFXCon 2003 it was finished two years later.
It's a 2D football game you play from the birds-eye-perspective either against the computer or a second player. The game later was released as bonus-cd content in an issue of a german videogame magazine called 'Bravo Screenfun' (issue 04/2006).
The whole game and all content are packed into a single 32 kilobyte small executable.
The online version of the manual can be found here
Given a framework and a small prepared selection of art and sound effects, one laptop, 10 hours time and a lot of coffee resulted in our contribution to the Dusmania 7.0 Overnight-Coding-Contest.
The game can be best described as a horizontal pong-shoot-em-up. You have to shoot the big bees which split into smaller ones after beeing hit. The background consists of a multi-layer parallax screen, there are some particle effects and shadow overlays.
Platform is Microsoft Windows, the native resolution is 640 x 480 and the game is written in C++.
A 3D remake of the famous International Karate in 64 kilobyte for Microsoft Windows.
The first version had an intro and a C64 console. The main purpose of the C64 console is to change the game parameter, but it also contains a parser with which very simple C64-Basic programs can be created.
The game is written in C and the 3D player models and animations where created manually by filling point arrays directly in the game code based on pen and paper calculations and tweaked while debugging.
The whole game, including all content, was packed into a single executable of 64 kilobyte size and a beta was first show at Dusmania 2003.
The (second) 32kb version had no intro/console, more comic style textures and was nearly finished, but also never released.
Katapult is an artillery-duel type of game. The size of the game and all content, wich is located in the executable, is 64 kilobyte. The final executable was already quite small and in addition packed with an special compression tool that squeezed the last bytes out of it.
The game also includes a small intro and two individual background tunes. The game is written in C except the rotating cubes in the intro which are coded in inline assembler.
When the game was first released (as freeware), the scores where uploaded to an online highscore embedded into our site. After a very short time the game was cracked and our online highscore full of cheated scores. After a sequence of releasing new versions with additional fraud prevention everytime followed by a new crack, the online highscore was removed.
The online version of the manual can be found here
An 3D space-shooter where you play a female mercenary earning money in space battles. Unfortunatly the game was never finished.
A simple space duel game. You have to defeat your opponent three times while dodging asteroids. There are also smaller spacecrafts and satellites blocking the space between the two opponents and have to be destroyed to get a free field of fire. The game runs under windows in a resolution of 800x600 pixels.
Playing around with particle effects and Open-GL.
A windows screensaver for the band Sourcecode containing an two layer effect for the background image and a realtime calculated plasma on top.
Rockmine is a 3D rail-shooter. You are riding in a lorry through an abandon mine, shooting stuff that appears like barrels or bats and other creatures. The game was developed for the rockband Axxis and was released on their album 'Eys of Darkness' as bonus content.
The game contains only one track (level) which was created out of a set of separate 3D tunnel segments that where combined by hand. Also the path the lorry drives through every segment was added manually. So getting seamless transitions between the segments took a lot of time. A level editor would have saved us a lot of time.
Another challenge where the light sources which were also placed and configured by hand. During this project we worked with 3D for the first time and the foundation was a custom 3D-engine based on Direct3D. That was a quite interesting but also painful learning process.
To add some variation to the gameplay we added track switches where you can shot a lever to choose an alternate path through the mine.
The background music are songs from the Axxis album which later contained the game
After the release we worked some time on an improved version which was never finished. That versions also contains the machine gun shown above.
A Snake clone for Windows with prerendered graphics. The game was never finished.
Joachim Vollkommer asked us to create a screensaver for his website (www.deathkiller.de). The background image is prerendered and also the coffin which is drifting through the water while a water sound effect is playing. The water surface is a realtime calculated effect.
This Microsoft Windows screensaver was created for the rockband Axxis. The background image is prerendered and overlayed with prerendered torch animations. The Axxis logo is a real-time rotated 3D object.
For this project we also created a general Windows installer for screensavers that was later used with all other screensavers too.
The screensaver requires Direct3D which was a quite common Windows feature at that time.
Wastlands is a classic RTS in a post-apocalyptic future where you fight with your opponents for remaining resources to survive.
The game never left the prototype stage and exists in various playable versions. The first version runs in SVGA (640x400) and all content is 2d pixel art. The graphics of the second version, which runs in VGA (320x200), are a mix of some prerendered and animated graphics (mostly buildings) and hand pixeled/amimated graphics (mostly units).
For the sprites we wrote an editor that supported some non-standard resolutions on a VGA display by playing around with VGA registers. That was quite dangerous, because certain combinations of settings could destroy your display. At least one display didn't survive our experiments.
There's also an variant of the SVGA version where the setting is switched from desert to water and you fight with naval units for artifical platforms in the ocean. That version was inspired by the movie Waterworld.
The game is written in C and to get a decent frame rate, the pixel routines and the pathfinding are written in inline assembler.
In this simulation you manage a farm and have to reach a chosen goal before your annoying competition does. So you plant hemp and mutated genetic vegetables and collect bribes so that the local nuclear power plant can discharge sewage into your little duck pond.
The game was our contribution to a game-programming competition announced in a local newspaper and organized by the administration of a town nearby. We worked on the game until a few hours before the deadline on a saturday morning and drove by train to the neighboring town to personally deliver the 3,5 inch master disk.
We where disqualified because of techniqual problems (that's what they told us). Maybe the jury just didn't share our sense of humor.
The games runs in MS-Dos uses SVGA resolution and so requires EMS/XMS (extended memory) support. The graphics where hand-drawn onto paper, scanned with a hand-scanner in several passed and colored after that.
A historical wargame located in the area of the american civil war. Four fractions fight with different unit types in this turn-based strategy game.
The game was released as shareware including a level editor. It sold one copy and was then rereleased as freeware. The shareware-version could be unlocked to the full version by entering codes from a code table.
Battlefield runs in MS-Dos with VGA resolution (320x200 pixels/256 colors) and was written in C. The monochrome background images where scanned with a hand scanner from a book about the american civil war.
With the level editor the background tiles and units can be set. Also there are some special fields like reinforcement spots or winning conditions that can be configured.
Some tiles contain animated water. This effect is a simple palette rotation and was quite common at that time. Palette rotation requires a graphics mode with a fixed color palette and then certain palette entries are shifted all the time and create an illusion of floating water for example.
The game also contains an extensive manual that can be viewed during the game or inside the editor.
In the intro the Windigo-Design logo is faded into a stone at a pond. This looks quite random, but initally the game was released under the label Dragonfly and later rebranded to Windigo-Design. So in the original version a dragonfly was engraved into the stone.