piXel

piXel was a game that I developed on and off throughout college. I spent a solid chunk of time on it, including blatantly during classes, and progress only started to slow down when LameStation came into the picture.

I think it's safe to say that this would be called a Metroid clone when finished, but I never finished it. All the game mechanics were from-scratch. I didn't know much about structuring a large program, so the entire game was written in a single DarkBASIC source file.

I made this with DarkBASIC, a funky proprietary game engine from way back when. Coincidentally, it was a book about DarkBASIC where I would first hear the name "Andre LaMothe", but that's a story for another day.

This hopelessly tied the game not only to Windows, but to a very specific version of DirectX from a million years ago. I do not understand it. Anyway, the game is unplayable on any machine I have, and even back then, was somewhere between difficult and impossible to share with others. Not the kind of thing that leads to your first blockbuster.

Frustration over distribution led me to try to port the game to C++, first with SDL and then Allegro. This effort never got far enough that there was much for anyone to "play".

My ideas for this game also became more ambitious over time. I wish I could say that this activity taught me a hard lesson about scope creep, but I would engage in scope creep for many years to come, even now.

Apologies for the poor quality images. I don't know what compelled me to save a screenshot as JPG back then.