SPEED - Allegro SpeedHack competition entry

This program is my entry for the Allegro SpeedHack competition, which was organised by Arron Shutt and run over the weekend of November 27/28, 1999.

It is basically a Space Invaders clone (yet again: I seem to like writing these :-) but with the twist that the 2d gameplay is projected onto four different pseudo-3d surfaces, which are at first viewed in alternation, but as you advance to the later levels will be displayed side by side, and finally all superimposed on the same display. This makes it extremely hard to see what is going on, but looks quite cool!

No graphics or sounds were harmed during the production of this game. It consists entirely of C source code, so everything that you see or hear was typed in using a text editor. The results aren't quite up to what is possible with paint programs, modeling packages, sound editors, etc, but I had fun doing everything by hand, and I think this gives it a nice retro feel. I'm tempted to argue that the competition time limit didn't give me room to do anything more sophisticated, but actually I could have put together a MIDI music track far more quickly than editing all those note tables in sound.c :-)

According to the competition rules, this game is required to use commandline options, a BEL, and contain the number 29. It does all three, of course, but you may need to read 29.txt before you will realize exactly how.

This code is free: do with it as you will.

speed.zip (218k, source only)

speedexe.zip (239k, DOS binary)

Matthew Leverton (matthew@aeroinc.net) was sufficiently crazy to port this whole thing to Java. You can find his version on http://www.allegro.cc/speed.

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