Arcade Clones
Introduction
During high school, I developed a handful of 256-color arcade clones for MS-DOS. Looking back and knowing what I know now, there certainly was room for improvement—but I did learn a lot about how people interact with your work and what makes for a rich and compelling user experience. I developed several projects (many of which were inspired by the work of Chris DeLeon), but my favorites are described below.
Space Shooter (2001)
Click here to download.†
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Based on the 1979 classic Asteroids, "Space Shooter" comprised a horizontally and vertically wrapping cosmos with drifting "space rocks" that were broken apart by your ship's fire power. Your ship could be destroyed by space rocks or enemy ships—which themselves could destroy space rocks. This game featured colorful animation and lively sound effects.
Downfall (2001)
Click here to download.†
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This was your run-of-the-mill Tetris clone without any sound effects or animation. It did include a means to add varying levels of randomly spaced tiles at the bottom of the playing field—adding some level of challenge to the game. This game took only one night to build.
Escape (2002)
Click here to download.†
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My mouse-operated version of Super Breakout featured 30 unique levels, managed with a menu that tracked best time and the date each level was most recently played. Special cheats were unlocked once all 30 levels were cleared. I found this game to be particularly difficult given that I had to play all 30 levels myself to make sure the game was actually beatable.
†Requires an emulator (e.g. DOSBox).
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