Game coder needed to help with game projects

hi!
About 10 years ago I developed a bunch of VGA Arcade shooter games for Dos. Typical one man show, All the artwork, sound effects, music, programming, etc. from scratch in a fast interpreted language called Euphoria for the PC. They were cool back then and fun to play. Here are a couple of youtubes of them running under dos box on the PC:

Star Ranger
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAt2MOEEtU0

OidZone
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJMQlca0DxM

I think these would be a blast to have as homebrew on the Wii, but I don't have the mad Wii skills needed to code these. Getting too old to learn all these new tricks. lol. I do have the original commented Euphoria source code, and all the data files, all the original artwork, sound effects, background music, font definitions, as well as a book I wrote with a complete source code explanation for OidZone, the basis for the game engine they all use.

Any game programmers out there who'd like to be part of a collaborative project?

The games would need to be coded from scratch with the original source code as a blueprint, and I can rework the original artwork and screen designs to better fit the Wii. The original code is pretty straight forward, and commented pretty well.

If anybody is interested I can provide links to zips of the original games to play on your PC. (dosbox on the Wii plays these incredibly slowly - 1 fps)

Eventually, I'd like to re-produce all six of the games for the Wii. They all work the same internally. Three of them are similar to OidZone in how they play, one is a space invaders clone, and Star Ranger modeled after Threshold on the Apple II. I also have a Pacman clone that was never finished, but had full AI and was playable.




I used to do game design for a living, and produced these as a hobby and as an experiment in doing something fun in the Euphoria language. At the time, nobody had ever tried doing fully "professional" games in the language. I even wrote a book on the process to try and spur interest.

My interest for the Wii is, again, to add some really fun and professional looking games into the homebrew community. I'd personally love to have people playing my games again. They look cool on the Wii screen.

Thanx
Michael Packard
Lord Generic Productions
Practically Righteous Studios



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/10/2009 07:06PM by berighteous.

Looks very cool. Are you plans to make these projects open source? Because of limited devs and limited time most of the projects are usually an open source collaboration, I find the best way to do this is via google code or sourceforge.

I wouldn't mind taking a look at the source to see how much effort it would be to port these.

Yay Euphoria! Still my favourite programming language. I remember Oidzone. Not sure how much help I'd be though as graphics programming is not my strong point. It'd be nice to see these on the Wii though.

You may want to keep track of the thread in the following link [www.tehskeen.com] . Seems a little bit of advice has been offered on how to cut down porting time, as a poster has mentioned a Euphoria language conversion program to convert the apps programming to C. I'm not sure how far that thread will go with advice, and what not, but if you keep track of it you may catch onto something to make the processes involved with porting a little less time consuming.

I'm watching both threads. I don't know if I can do the c conversion, as some of the include libraries I originally used either don't exist anymore, or no longer work in the current version. soundblaster routines, keyboard reading, and font printing. Since all of these would be different on the Wii, it doesn't make much sense to me to do the C conversion, when the euphoria code is so simple.

Euphoria is a neat language built around sequence indexing - you can have multi dimensional arrays of different length keeping track of everything in the game. Say like graphic[1] may be the pallette for the 8 bit image, graphic[2] may be all of the pixel data for the whole image, where graphic[1][27] is the rgb value for color 27 in that pallette, and graphic[2][21] may be the actual pixel color, based on the pallette, of pixel 9 of line 3 of a 9x25 sprite image. Euphoria didn't care about what was in the sequences. Once sequence could contain 30 frames of animation, and you could index any pixel from any frame in the animation. Made having animated sprites a dream - you could have 50 asteroids moving around, oid[1]...oid[50], and say x=oid[J][K], setting the sequence x to the image data from frame J for oid[J] and then you could send X to the draw sprite function and it would take the data and put it on the screen.

Using sequence indexing like that I wrote a sprite draw routine that indexed through the sprite and any pixel that wasn't color 0 it "drew" to the virtual screen by indexing into that sequence and replacing the color value that was there. Then it kept track of the regions of the virtual screen that changed from everything moving this frame and once we moved everything that moved, it drew all the regions to the actual screen at once. It was pretty quick for an interpreted language it could keep up with 40 or more moving sprites at game speed of 20fps on a 486-33.

I originally wrote Oidzone as an extreme example of what could be done with sequence indexing alone with no graphics libraries or anything (there were none for euphoria when I wrote it) I wrote a whole game engine that I could retrofit a new game into in 2 days once the new artwork was done. StarKiller and StarThief were ready for playtesting in two days using the OidZone engine.

The logic code is very simple, so I would think a good Wii coder could get it up and running in no time using the wii graphics libraries that surely do it faster and better than I did.

I'm looking at the source code book I wrote (converting it from Wordperfect 1997 to Word 2007, lol) When I get the "Theory Section" readable I'll post a link to it so anybody interested could see how I approached it. Some may find it amusing. So much game programming theory and practices have evolved so much since I developed this from scratch.

I'm not sure about "open source," at least until any game is released. I want to retain creative control through completion of each game as I designed them. But anybody who wants to help me put these together can help. I'd like to keep track of who is doing what.

When the game is "done" open source is fine by me. I'd love to see other people playing with the code to make it better or changing it to make their own games.

I'm not opposed to donating an honorarium of some kind to the coders who help me put these together, lol.

Hi berighteous,

I'm interested in taking a look if that's OK with you. If you'd like to communicate about these projects you can email me scanff AT yahoo.com or I try to be on #Wiidev if you're into IRC.