Spaced

I did almost all of this in high school. By the time it shipped, the platform it was optimized for (‘386) was obsolete. Lesson learned!

Practically every pixel you see is rendered via custom 386-optimized assembly routines for decoding and clipping RLE-encoded bitmaps, and all the digital audio was output via a sound mixer I wrote, since the soundblaster only had one sound channel.

All of the animation, art, fonts, and tiled levels were created in art programs I wrote. I didn’t realize you could “buy” art and art software…  Plus I was headstrong and wanted to do everything myself. So yeah, all the “art” is mine (can’t you tell)

I wrote all the music too. I was inspired by Golden-Axe-for-the-PC’s awesome PC speaker music. I eventually wrote a music sequencer for the Soundblaster’s music synthesizer, but only the ending song uses that.

“Shipping” meant sending it to HappyPuppy.com, which used to be a huge site for PC game downloads, where apparently 100k people downloaded it.

You can view screenshots, specs, and more at the Facebook page.  You can also view more videos, including the ending credits sequence with FM soundblaster support, on my YouTube channel.

Or you can download it here.

If you choose to download it, you can run it on Windows, but will need to choose PC speaker music and sound effects.  If you want to hear actual digital sound effects, you’ll need to use D-Fend Reloaded or DOSBox.  The PC speaker music is pretty good IMHO, I think I gave Golden Axe run for its money!