(2004) Project One - first university game programming club project

Towards the end of 2003, soon after the formation of the Game Programming Club (I had just started second year), we decided that we should make a game, as a team.
We swiftly divided out general and poorly scoped tasks to everyone, not really considering that not everyone had the same goals. My part was the engine, and I started working on it immediately.

The plan was to create a Diablo-like action RPG. The communication was quite scarce, and after a while, I found that I was taking the game, titled Project One, in my own direction. Soon, everyone was doing their own thing, and I gladly continued by myself on Project One for about a year, on and off.

By the time I became disinterested in it, it could do some nifty things:

• NPC alignment - you could have opposing NPC teams, and it was awesome to make them fight each other
• Triggers - these could be set-up to have basic narration and NPC acting
• Combat - attack speeds, recovery from hits
• Arbitrarily scaled textures - you could build huge castles, and awesome forests by varying proportions of textures
• Multiple textures on a cell - you could control the texture on each side of a wall

It also had a WYSIWYG map editor which could

• Control map objects and their properties
• Create NPCs and modify their statistics and alignment
• Create unreacheable areas, bounding the map

I've included the source code for anyone interested. The plan had never been to make something as broad as this, which can explain the poor quality of the application. If I could start it again, I'd definitely write it in a more modular fashion. But it still makes me happy. It gave me something nice to do between school assignments, etc. It is a Visual C++ 6.0 project, with a very small amount of outside code (TGA loading mostly).

I'm also including two videos captured way back in 2004. The first shows some of the game's capabilities, and the second shows the map editor in action.
The music during the second video was meant to play throughout gameplay, and I added it just to see how well it would fit in with the "look" of the game. Why I chose
the map editor, I have no idea.

The graphics were taken from a freeware tile/sprites website. I think I created the ugly mouse cursor, and that's about it...

Downloads

Source code
- Source - Complete Visual C++ 6.0 source package

Gameplay footage

Map editor footage (and test in-game music)

Screenshots