Description
Take a journey with Biff and Spiff to take back their crystal from an evil alien race. This crystal was their people's only power source which had given them their incredible
intelligence. But since it was stolen, you have to listen Biff and Spiff's "incredibly" stupid conversations (you always have the choice to turn off this feature:)
Spaced is a 256-colors VGA shoot'em up which is created by only one person, Daniel Haffner. It has a very colourful super-scroll and "a bit cheesy" converted FM music from PC speaker music format...
Alternate Titles
- "Crusade for the Crystal" -- Original Title, was later changed
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Trivia
All about Spaced:
--from its author, Daniel Haffner...
STORY BEHIND THE GAME
So who says that one guy can't make a game? I notice that lots of people
are studying the different aspects of game-making, but few people actually
have time to complete a game. Fortunately, most of these people make
their code and knowledge available to the public so that others may learn
from it. To those individuals - I thank you, and I'm sure most other
designers/coders feel the same.
When I first started SPACED, (during my junior year in high school,) I had
no idea about how to code for the Sound Blaster, mix sounds, use EMS
memory, and a lot of other important stuff. when I "finished" it up, it
had PC speaker sound and music, and plenty of bugs. It was also called
"Crusade for the Crystal," and had even cheesier text than it does now.
It was in that state that I entered it in "Tech Challenge '94" at the
Oregon Institute of Technology. Fortunately none of the bugs popped up
during the presentation and I got first in my category.
After that, I sort of let the project sit during my senior year, while I
got into some 3-D Studio work. Then during summer, I got ahold of some
Sound Blaster information, which allowed me to write an FM synthesis
sequencer and digital sound mixer. I only use the sequencer for the
ending song, however, and the other songs are converted at run-time from
the PC speaker music format to FM music. So it sounds a bit cheesy, but I
didn't have time to write all-new songs for the levels. Anyway, I redrew
a lot of the graphics, and basically prettied up the game real good for
its release.
SPACED was a game made just to see if I could make a game. I didn't
attempt anything spectacular, but I wanted to make it enjoyable and fun.
I think that I succeeded there. The control feels good, people who aren't
playing can read the text, the sounds are satisfying, and there are some
fun options. Another thing that I think adds to the fun is that each of
the level backgrounds is distinctly unique. Too many games have levels
that all look pretty much the same. And the game will run on any '386 and
up, and at 35 frames per second if you use a '386/33 or better. Since
every bit of real-time graphics is assembly language, and the sprite
drawing routines use run-length-encoded files, this makes the game run
pretty fast.
Interesting facts about SPACED
SPACED was coded on a 486SX/25 with 4 Megs of RAM. For the past six
months it has had a bug that causes it to wait an average of three
minutes before it boots. The clock (but not the date) resets to an
arbitrary time following each reboot. The old box, however, is still
limping along.
The rainfall sound (outside the buildings) in level 3 was actually
made by crinkling a plastic bag in front of a microphone at a high
frequency and then slowing it down a bit.
SPACED is composed of over 50 C++ modules, and 19 assembly language
routines. The final build included over 16,000 lines of (used) C++
code, and over 3,000 lines of assembly code.
(Taken from the readme file of Spaced)
