The second part of a collection of Soft Dorothy Software scraps and game experiments from the early 90's.
As with the other repos (Soft Dorothy - Unfinished Tales Vol 1, Soft Dorothy-Shareware Projects and Soft Dorothy - Casady & Greene Projects), this is a disk image that can be mounted with a 68K Mac emulator. This disk image contains more projects that I began, did not complete.
Here is the continuation of the list that I presented part of in the README to Unfinished Tales Vol. 1. The list ends with the game I was working on at that time, Mac Tuberling. Other titles listed below that I did release were Stella Obscura and Pararena.
:
sd17 = Sled Run incomplete <slow, no fun>
sd18 = Stella Obscura v.1.0 +++
sd19 = Tripod 3D incomplete <no point>-K
sd20 = Thief of Baghdad incomplete <no point>
sd21 = Pararena v.1.0/1.1/1.2 +++
sd22 = AirBikes incomplete <slow>
sd23 = Roll-A-Rena incomplete <control>
sd24 = DeepSketch incomplete
sd25 = Fighting Kite working on
sd26 = X-Glyph working on
sd27 = UnMask v.1.0 +++
sd28 = Mac Tuberling working on
Though my book-keeping ended there, I have still more projects as you will see below (in what I believe is the order that they were worked on).
I like the artwork.
When I wrote this (about May, 1990) I was probably remembering a few skiing games from early game consoles like the Intellivision. I was also channeling fun times I had as a kid racing down a snow covered hill on a sled. (The ramps that get you airborne though are pure fantasy.)
Sled Run is a good example of a game sketch where you say at this point, "Okay, but this isn't really fun." Here too though might be an example of a game where spending more time with it, trying various things, might in fact have brought it to a fun place. If networking were more of a thing back in the 90's a sled racing game might have kicked ass.
Only now I just remembered imagining as a kid specialized enclosed sleds designed for hours-long races down ... I don't know ... the Matterhorn?
Turning the cursor into a bird was a cute addition, but I moved on.
I was fascinated by the stereo (actual 3D) images you could create on the Macintosh and did a rather lightweight game called Stella Obscura about May of 1990. Tripod 3D was a kind of continuation of that. Stella Obscura was what you would call parallel stereo where, if you can relax your eyes, your eyes are looking in parallel at the two images: your left eye looking at the left image, your right eye looking at the right. Without additional optics, it's rather difficult for most people to do.
Tripod 3D was just an experiment to test a different approach. One of the images, let's say the right one, is flipped as though a mirror image of what the right eye would see. The left image is normal. But you place a mirror, running vertical between the bridge of your nose and the center of the screen — separating the two images. If the reflective side of the mirror is to the right, your left eye sees the left image as per normal, but the right eye, will see the reflected right image in the mirror — hopefully precisely over the left image (if that makes sense).
It's stereo just like Stella Obscura but much more relaxing for people to adjust their eyes to. The caveat of course is that you need to build a rather odd viewing contraption with the mirror and all that. For what it's worth, it the depth effect worked very well.
If you should give it a try, the mouse button activates the player's jetpack thruster in order for the player to gain elevation. Moving the mouse left and right moves the jet-pack'd player left and right, white moving the mouse vertically actually moves the player in and out of depth. In this way you can circumnavigate the "tripod" in stereo.
Thief of Baghdad (working title was Carpet) was a sketch for a "platformer" game — the platforms being magical flying carpets. Sad to say though, I never implemented hit detection code to enable our little thief to jump from one carpet to the next — so you have to content yourself to the one carpet you begin on.
Sometimes, like in this case, you want to test a game mechanic/dynamic. You can move the carpet up as fast as you like — getting our thief airborne. But he falls more slowly. The left and right mouse will move him — but only when his feet are on the carpet. Without going much further in the coding, I could see that it would be challenging (maybe a bit like Frogger?) but could be fun.
Although I put this aside in May, 1990, I would revisit the idea in early 1992. The new version would be in color (and renamed Scheherazade).
Around September, 1990 I was playing with AirBikes. The game K-10 (see Unfinished Tales Vol. 1) was my first stab at a racing game, AirBikes, a side-scroller, was I guess my second. I didn't even get as far as I did in K-10. Your player is there, and you can steer, accelerate, brake. There are barrels blocking your path along the road but there isn't even basic collision detection so you can blaze right through them. There are no sounds, no enemies.
It's too bad though because when I play with the game now, such as it is, I can hear some really cool sounds in my head that would really take the experience to the next level.
And the artwork (probably inspired by the first Heavy Metal film) is kind of cool. If you play with this at all watch how the exhaust pops from the airbike when you accelerate — the woman's hair is tossed in the wind, she leans when she turns, pops up off the seat when braking.
My note for AirBikes from the text file at the top of this README says simply <slow>. Did I bail on the game simply for that reason — that it felt slow on my lowly Macintosh Plus? The sprite art shows the beginning of an opponent, floating mines, a riderless airbike. One can imagine dodging barrels, mines, opponents — occasionally be sent over the bars of the airbike... Maybe I didn't really have anywhere else to go with it though.
Later I would partner with a programmer named Jeff Robbin to work on a collaborative racing-style game called Spaceway 2000. I think we both agree it was kind of "meh". Perhaps racing games were just not something I was meant to write.
I was working on Roll-A-Rena about September, 1990 another game, Pararena around October, 1990. So clearly I was having some kind of roller-derby fixation. Maybe I had just watched Raquel Welch in Kansas City Bomber on TV (or Rollerball — or both).
Not much came of Roll-A-Rena while Pararena I finished and released as shareware. What there is of Roll-A-Rena feels to me like just an experiment in user input. I'm not even sure how it works or is supposed to work. The mouse button will move your player's feet back and forth — moving the mouse left and right "steers" the player nearer or farther from us. If I had to guess, I think pumping the mouse button was intended to give you a forward impulse. Climbing the roller-arena wall would trade forward velocity for potential energy. Skating away from the wall would do the reverse.
Without any visual cues though it is not obvious if you are moving forward around the area and if you , how quickly. I guess I abandoned this one a little soon for that.
Again, the sprite sheet is telling. I'm going to guess the flags were going to be the thing that scrolled around the back edge of the arena to give you the sense of movement. A player from the opposing team is in the sprite sheet (wearing black). It looks like elbowing and jumping were to be part of the game.
I kind of want to pick this one up again and at least move it a little further along. Likely work on Pararena took me away from doing that at the time.
DeepSketch was another stereo 3D experiment. Not a game, it was a fun little attempt at a drawing program to see the relationship between the 3D depth effect and interactivity. Like Tripod 3D previously, it used a vertical separating mirror to assist the 3D effect. Since I currently don't have such a setup, I'll have to rely then on my memory of the time — I remember that being able to "doodle spatially" was a pretty cool thing.
Although the palette (above) suggests a circle tool, rectangle tool, brush, different patterns, line weights, only the freehand drawing tool (pencil) was ever implemented. Nonetheless, the + (plus) and - (minus) keys do change the "depth" of the pencil. Making a gentle spiral with the mouse while holding down either the plus or minus at the same time was a wild effect — a spiral falling into or rising up out of the display.
As you can see in the screenshot, having a mirrored menu bar was kind of different. In fact the whole menu is faked with an image containing the reversed menu.
Working title: Fighting Kite. I know the traditional Asian fighting kites did not have two strings, but aerobatic kites were kind of becoming a thing when I wrote East Winds (December, 1990) so I depict two hands on each side of the screen each holding a handle attached to a string to the kite (you don't actually see the kite strings). Moving the mouse left or right shifts the hands in opposite directions from one another — one hand raising as the other hand pulls down. This action causes the diamond-shaped kite to rotate one way or the other.
Moving the mouse forward or backward acts as a "collective" moving both hands up or down — removing or adding velocity to the kite. Fly far left or far right and the view pans to follow your kite. Fly too far though and the wind falls off significantly and your kite can no longer remain airborne.
So this again was another exercise in experimental game input. Could a player begin to learn how to intuitively control the kite with just motions of the mouse affecting orientation and pull of the kite? I enjoy these indirect methods of control (in a similar sense to having to leverage floor vents to get lift for your paper Glider).
Even playing it a bit though I still find I am crashing repeatedly into the ground. Maybe there is some more tuning that can be done to the input to make that less frequent?
But what to do with these kite flying skills? I added balloons very much like my game Glider that you try to cut the string from. And like Joust, if you dilly-dally too long, just enjoying the kite flying weather, an "oriental" dragon appears in the sky to fire a bolt of energy at your kite.
Once I latched on to the Asian theme I enjoyed adding things like the Asian dragon, an abacus for keeping score, the man that sits after he releases your kite, the small pagoda-like hut...
Of the games on this volume of Unfinished Tales, East Winds is the most complete. Is it fun though? Not really. Or maybe I should let you judge for yourself.
I have nothing remaining of this game but the entry mentioned at the top of this README and a partial sprite sheet from a single MacPaint document. I also don't remember it. I'm going to hazard a guess though that it was a networked or two-player version of my shareware game Glypha. The player's mount (above) is a black version of the mount from the published Glypha (so, player 2?).
Not a game. In fact but a mote of a utility. I include it here simply because I'm a completist. From the doc I found there must have been an app in the day that would mask mouse events in the OS and when it exited leave the OS in that state — the user now unable to use the mouse button. This small utility (I claim I wrote it in 10 minutes and I am sure that is true) "unmasks" the mouse events.
Kind of funny that a rogue app back on that much-simpler Mac OS could screw up the events for all other apps.
The one document I have been relying upon containing the creator codes ends with MacTuberling (a game I released and is on the shareware archive I uploaded) and so for the rest of the archive I put together I will have to rely on file modification dates to try to construct an approximate timeline. Fortunately, Ice Runner (about July 1991) also has a creator code sd30, making it the two games after MacTuberling (I have yet to discover what sd29 was).
As you can see, Ice Runner is in color. I had only just got my first color Macintosh (an inexpensive Macintosh IIsi) in 1991 after Casady & Greene had advanced me money for the game Glider that I was developing for them to publish. So from more or less that point on, my game experiments go full color. Glypha II was the first shareware game I released in color, Ice Runner is probably my first unfinished experiment.
I loved the ice sailboats (ice boats?) that I used to see plans for in old The Boy Mechanic books and so tried to capture some ice-sailing physics in a game. I imagined a game where the player has no control over the direction of the wind (of course) but instead can set only the rudder and sail angles. Playable? Challenging? Fun? Let's sketch out the game and find out.
You can try it for yourself. And though I can't claim that the physics implementation is spot-on, I felt I had put enough effort into it to determine that the game was probably a non-starter. It was a head-scratcher for me to play — and I am supposed to know how it works. I didn't think that it would be a game that others would enjoy.
Again, the sprite sheet: a second ice boat suggests one-on-one races between rigs was in the plans.
If you want to play it, the point is to follow the course laid out within the markers — and to try to navigate the course as quickly as you can. Controls for the rudder are A and S, controls for setting angle of the sail are F and H with the G key zeroing (luffing?) the sail. The game assumes a 640 x 480 display, will switch to 16 colors if you are not already in that display mode (nice to be able to borrow code from previous games — Glider 4.0 in this case).
Oh, and I didn't play with it, but it appears to have a course editor where you should be able to lay out the pylons for your own course. Usually the level editors on these sketches are still pretty bare-bones though.
Following in the footsteps of the previously mentioned East Winds, the partially-implemented Streamer was a side scrolling, flight-related experiment. Maybe you know/remember the old control-line model airplanes. More specifically there was a model airplane hobby involving flying what were called combat airplanes. Model planes with small gas engines would pull behind them a paper streamer. The goal was to cut off the streamer of your opponent while maintaining your own plane's.
Very little of the game was implemented. Trying to be true to physics (and having actually, briefly, flown a control-line model airplane) the simulated combat airplane in Streamer dives quickly, is slower to climb. This makes for a pretty twitchy interface that feels more painful than fun. For that reason, moving forward with the work needed to add an opponent, add sound (add an actual streamer) was cancelled. So in June, 1991, I shelved it.
If you're counting, I might have shelved something like four games for every one game that went all the way to shipping. Or maybe it's 5-to-1. For this reason alone I have always been suspicious of pre-announced games (and I have never pre-announced any of my own games). I know all too well that a game that shows initial promise — perhaps visually, feature-wise — can still be missing that "magical spark" that makes the game fun, compelling. It's why I "move fast and shelve things".
This volume of Unfinished Tales sees the end of my B&W games and experiments. It may also be the end of my Pascal programming days. By 1992 or so I would switch to color and to the C programming language exclusively. I confess, having revisited all these little experiments now, I find I have a stronger attachment to the B&W art than the color art that came later. Perhaps I was just not very good working with color — or perhaps the B&W emphasized texture, use of light and dark areas. Or maybe the B&W is simply more nostalgic.
I will return with Unfinished Tales, Vol. 3 where the scope and types of games I start to experiment with begins to broaden at times from the sprite-based games I had previously been focused on.
John Calhoun—