Crystal Hammer

⏱️Overview

Here I will gather 2 last games I made in DOS. Each of them also featured an editor, for creating (drawing) maps.
Still in resolution 320×200 (256 colors) and in Turbo Pascal 7.0 with parts in Assembler. This was on PC with Pentium 120MHz. I tried 640×400 later, but it was too slow.

🚗Car game

📜History

The first game I just called Porsche. Poor name, it’s a brand name, so it can’t be used. But I was a kid and had a model and a poster of such car.
On the most bottom left screenshot there is a first, starting version of this game.
This is what’s left. Very sadly, I have lost the final version (had no others) about 1 or 2 years after.
But I won’t forget how we played it, in the summer of 1997 with elementary school colleague(s).

📊Features

Game was for 2 players only and had split screen. Cars were in center, map moved below. Similar way to my earlier 2 Planes game here.
Maps had 3 sizes (square, in pixels): small (250 x 250), medium (450) and big (700). Due to only 640kB memory big maps didn’t start in IDE, so I could only test the game on medium.

It was a simple, rally type driving with lots of sliding (especially in winter and autumn).

The final game had 87 tracks in 7 sceneries: Forest, Jungle, Desert, Winter, Australia, Autumn, City (latest new: Mountain).
About 18 of them were actually just circles, ellipses and rounded rectangles. These were real fun to play with many laps.
I still have all our track prototypes drawn on paper. They lasted way longer than any of my PCs.

There was an editor for creating tracks, where I would draw road:

• straights and turns,
• bridges or dips
• jumps (car flew for a while without control, longer with more speed at start)

Then place trees (also all of 9 types of vegetation at once), water, etc.

There were also few graphic attractions like:

• staying tire trails
• dust behind cars (on deserts)
• screen blur effect in autumn (with more speed), kind of like rain.

Next, gameplay features were areas, with:

• water
• mud (slowing down)
• grease (less control and random turning)
• ice (no control)

These were already present in my earlier game from 1996.
Water puddles in autumn were even more slippery than the wet road.

Then were some funny things:

• stacks of tires – didn’t damage car, but bounced it back and sounded funny
• blocks of hay – helping on road, or side, by slowing car down, e.g. before sharp turns
• hedges – were along road, safe, didn’t bounce or damage car
• sharp bushes damaging car (possible on road)
• city tracks could have crosswalks with people (few pixels), you could smash

Game featured sounds of course. The collision detection was quite basic (bad) but worked. The car just bounced back after hitting anything (trees and such), in the opposite direction it hit.
We had simple damage slowing down cars. Tracks had repairing areas, car didn’t need to stop just drive over them.

So the screenshots on left, with car in center, show actually the next version Porsche II, which was started later but never finished.

🚁Shooter

The second game, a top view scrolling shooter, again I poorly named Rambo II. Was meant to have similar jungle style to that movie.

I did the basic start of game, 2 enemy planes, 3 weapons for player’s helicopter, animating water (palette), sparks on hit, and explosions.
And the editor for map was quite good. I was drawing terrain levels, then few algorithms were adding noise, blurring few times to make it look like foliage (grassy hills). Then I could put rivers, with increasing width, starting from tiny streams. Rivers had auto added rocks on sides. On screen there are 2 types visible, clear blue and olive.
There was also a separate tool, visible in the middle, just for putting enemy ships and picking their paths in places on the map. It was possible to move the map (in time) to show where ships will be.

Once I showed this project in class (technical high school), I didn’t have to do anything, besides attending. It was very cool.

⏳Conclusions

Since the loss (of Porsche with 87 tracks) was a result of my stupidity, I’ll gather the faults that led to it, with what I learned to do below:

• HDD fail (the worst failing Seagate 1GB). I then even bought a second of same type (was cheaper) and it failed later too.
  Well today I’m checking for fail rates of HDDs before I buy and I don’t go just for the cheapest.
  For some time I made backups on CD/DVD/BR, some lasted more than HDDs. But now I don’t, recorders cost the same as HDDs. Eventually all HDDs fail, and I think I had maybe 2 every 5, lasting longer than I needed it. Now I have one HDD more, just for backup (of important data).
• I made just one backup copy, on floppy disks, using a freaking self extracting RAR (binary exe). Without the 1st I can’t extract any later.
  I never used self extracting type after, and also forgot about RAR after I found out 7zip, which is also supported in DoubleCommander.
• I have overwritten the backup, the first 8 of 23 parts. I shouldn’t ever do that. There were several ways to avoid this. Worst is that it was actually a suggestion from, well the stupidest teacher I had. The one who also said “you can overclock your CPU, no problems” and my motherboard died after. Later he even ended in jail for stealing huge money sums, also some from students.
  So yeah, as the saying goes: “never follow advice from people who you wouldn’t trade places with”.
• I never made any copy of the source code during. It was 65kB for game and 68kB for editor.
  This is so small, that I should have copied it every day. Later I started just making archives often, from just my sources.
  And since I started with github I have repositories of my main projects there.
• I would even loose everything from DOS (my projects in Turbo Pascal) with that stupid HDD, if I didn’t copy it all to my friend. I think it was my idea, so he could learn from it. He kept it and then I could restore it back.

Finally, I used few concepts of this car game and many actual tracks in our 3D game (started 13 yeas later) Stunt Rally. And since Stunt Rally was really well made and its track count reached 176, I don’t miss my 1997 game so much (which took 2 or 3 weeks to make). While Stunt Rally had (over) 5 years of development, and I wouldn’t make it so only by myself.