Games from the vault on Michael Morrison

Battle Office

Thu, 01 Jan 2004 00:00:00 -0800

A top-down office-themed combat game written as a demo for one of the early-2000s Java game programming books. Players navigate a maze of cubicles and fight off coworkers (or something close to that — memory of the exact mechanic is hazy). Built with the Java AWT/Swing graphics stack that was the only realistic option for in-browser games before Flash got serious.

Connect 4 (Mobile)

Thu, 01 Jan 2004 00:00:00 -0800

Classic Connect Four, built for J2ME-capable phones in the mid-2000s. The interesting design constraint was the input — most phones of the era had 12 numeric keys plus a 5-way directional pad, and any game needed to be playable with that and only that. Demo for the J2ME mobile game programming book.

Henway

Thu, 01 Jan 2004 00:00:00 -0800

A Frogger-style game where you cross a busy road as a chicken. The name comes from the bad joke — What’s a henway? About four pounds. Built as a demo for the Java game programming series, covering tile-based maps, sprite movement, and the kind of game logic that fit into 50KB of compiled Java.

Henway (Mobile)

Thu, 01 Jan 2004 00:00:00 -0800

Mobile port of the desktop Henway Frogger clone, optimized for the small screens and limited memory of J2ME-era handsets. Demo for the J2ME mobile game programming book. The tile map had to be simplified considerably from the desktop version to fit in the available memory.

High Seas (Mobile)

Thu, 01 Jan 2004 00:00:00 -0800

A Battleship-style two-player mobile game for J2ME devices. Demo for the J2ME mobile game programming book, with a focus on how to handle turn-based multiplayer game state on devices that couldn’t be assumed to have any network connectivity at all.

Meteor Defense

Thu, 01 Jan 2004 00:00:00 -0800

A Missile Command–inspired defense game. You’re at the bottom of the screen, meteors fall from above, you shoot them down before they hit the ground. Demo for the Java game programming series. The interesting technical bit was managing dozens of simultaneous projectile trajectories without dropping below 30fps in a browser-embedded JVM.

Space Out

Thu, 01 Jan 2004 00:00:00 -0800

A Space Invaders–style fixed-shooter where waves of aliens descend from the top of the screen and you defend the bottom with a horizontally-moving ship. Demo for the Java game programming series. Later ported to J2ME as a mobile version.

Space Out (Mobile)

Thu, 01 Jan 2004 00:00:00 -0800

Mobile port of the desktop Space Out shooter for J2ME devices. Demo for the J2ME mobile game programming book. The fixed-shooter format translated well to small screens; the bigger challenge was managing the small (~512KB) JAR size limit imposed by most carriers of the era.

Stunt Jumper

Thu, 01 Jan 2004 00:00:00 -0800

A side-scrolling stunt-vehicle game where you launch off ramps and try to land jumps without crashing. Demo for the Java game programming series. The terrain generation and physics-lite collision handling were the most interesting parts to write.

Combat Tanks

Sat, 01 Jan 1994 00:00:00 -0800

A two-player tank combat game for Windows 3.1, written in 1994 with my college roommate Randy Weems — credited under our college-era handles, Quixote (me) and Gandalf (Randy). Top-down tank-vs-tank in the lineage of Atari’s Combat (1977), built as a native Win16 application at a time when the going wisdom said no one was going to make action games for Windows.