Submitted the “game” last night, but I was too tired to make a post about it. Game is over here.

I unfortunately didn’t didn’t get a chance to finish it, so it’s very short. That being said, I’m rather happy with the results. I was using a very old 16bit DOS compiler (turboC, 1988), I had to run it with warnings disabled as it wouldn’t shut up and no amount of brackets and casting could make it understand that I meant to do something a certain way — the lack of useful warnings was a massive contrast to how I’d run GCC, with -Wall. This lead to a lot of bugs, glitches and issues throughout.

I’m also convinced that as you approached the 64kb global/static memory limit in TurboC that some variables would begin to overlap or something to that effect. I did a little reading and discovered TurboC was prone to a lot of weirdness, so it doesn’t seem out of the question. Knowing the compiler would be less forgiving in terms of warnings I specifically approached the code with the intent of avoiding malloc (I did use it for allocating memory for the images, though), I only discovered later on about the global/static memory limit. Despite turboC’s 64k limit there was something quite nice about only using the stack and global/static memory, as if you get a much clearer idea of exactly how much memory you’re using and don’t need to worry about memory leaks or other memory issues, everything has a preset upper bound. This has made me consider writing a game that doesn’t use malloc at all in the future, although I’d have to use a different compiler.

I may do a longer write up on the technical aspects of the game and its code, but I question how relevant the information might be in 2013 😉

Looking forward to trying out some of the other entries, I saw some impressive screenshots being posted. I’ll hopefully get a chance to give them a go this evening.