The Ancient Games of the Rampant Coyote, Part 1

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 22, 2011

My first games, mainly for the Commodore 64, have been lost forever.  This is not what anybody should consider a tragedy to the art of gaming. But when I’ve found old stories, dungeon write-ups, and so forth from an earlier era of my life, I often do find it pretty inspirational. I would love to merge the raw energy and creativity I had at age 15 with the skill and practicality I have now.  If that combination can actually exist together.

A year or so ago I stumbled across a 3.25 inch floppy diskette containing some old game projects of mine from my early twenties. Yes, that’s right – I could fit multiple projects on a single 1.4 meg diskette. This was an era where I think my entire hard drive was a whopping 320 megabytes. With every desktop computer upgrade, I’ve always sprung for a floppy drive. Why? Because I still have a bunch of old games in that format I may still want to load up and play some day, that’s why. And for a case just like this one where I can dredge up the past a little bit.

Anyway – I put a bunch of these old projects – plus a couple of slightly more recent ones – in a directory on my hard drive. I don’t know if I can compile these things anymore without major modifications — I believe I wrote them using a version of Borland C++ (Turbo C++?).

This first one is one I’d love to revisit some day. I called it “Netrunner: Pawn’s Gambit,” a cyberpunk-style action-RPG I wrote around 1994 that drew inspiration from William Gibson, R. Talsorian’s Cyberpunk RPG, Interplay’s Neuromancer (based on Gibson’s novel of the same name), Steve Jackson’s Hacker boardgame, and – significantly – the old Synapse Software game Shamus and its sequel (which in turn were inspired by the arcade game Berzerk).

The core idea is that you play a futuristic computer hacker who plugs into “Cyberspace” (the speculative fiction version of what the Internet would some day be) via interface electronics right into his brain, controlling your actions (and hacking) at the speed of thought – necessary to react fast enough to the AI counter-intrusion programs.

Rather than make it a 3D experience (3D was pretty ugly back then, and while I was writing some 3D games back then, they were with flat-shaded colored polygons), I decided that THIS game’s interface into the cybernetic Internet would be in the 2D. It’s easier to get situational awareness that way, you know?

Anyway, the main menu of the game (pictured above) was the bulk of the “meat space” (real world) interaction. Instead of “leveling up,” exactly, you’d upgrade your hardware and software.  You’d earn money (instead of XP) by siphoning off money from bank accounts you’d hack access to at various locations on the Net, and by fencing hot data (or used hardware) to Fish the Fence.

Once you’d “jack into the Net”, you’d get this screen to the left. This was a map of all the locations in the world. They were color-coded based upon their difficulty. I think their shape meant something as well… circles were businesses or personal sites, then there were other shapes that meant things like government or military installations. I don’t remember, and haven’t looked at that code to see if I had any comments to say what I intended them for. I never got that far in making the game.

The map screen was really not much of a game – nothing would happen there. But when you’d move onto a grid spot with a node, then you could try and enter the node – which was where the real gameplay happened.

Inside a node, it was pretty much standard action game fare. You’d move from room to room, fighting off the AI defenses and navigating the static defenses (most popular being the ubiquitous locks… which you could either crack with software (if possible), or would have to hunt for inside the system, dodging and fighting defense programs as you went. Your “deck” (cyberdeck) could hold so many points worth of software at a time, and more advanced software couldn’t run on weaker systems.  You could download the software if you found it on any deck, but just couldn’t run it.

The software formed your tools and weapons. “Bullet” and its kin were the standard ranged attack program – you’d shoot projectiles with it of varying strength, speed, and special qualities. Landmine would drop a bomb invisible to the AI, which would explode whenever an AI got within a particular proximity.  Then there were “freeze” programs that would cause the AI programs to freeze in place, harmlessly, for a bit. Incidentally (I discovered, playing it), “killing” an AI program only reset it – it would respawn instantly in its original location. Maybe a slight delay before respawning would have been a better approach…

The nice thing about this all being a “virtual reality” system is that I didn’t need to worry about my graphics being realistic at all. They were all projections created by the neural interface, after all. And you can see even then my tendency for absolutely glaring misuse of color, a habit I still have not licked today.

The AI were supposed to be of all shapes, flavors, and strengths.  I think I had two or three implemented.  Similar-appearing AI (of different colors) were supposed to have similar attacks and styles.  Some would hang out and shoot at you. Some would shoot homing weapons at you. Some would chase you. Some would do damage to you (which would damage your hardware and your own health). Others would freeze you in place, allowing you to take actions but not move, making you easy prey for the other AI. And so forth.

You’d find passwords and keys in the different rooms. Then there was data areas, where you’d collect your “treasure” (in the form of skimmed bank account info, sellable data, or storyline text). The “story” of the game, as in Neuromancer, was in the form of text files found scattered across the Net pointing to a grand conspiracy, and conversations in the “Gentleman Boozer” bar with other hackers like you.

I wish I remembered what the story was about, because the bits and pieces I’ve found in the game were tantalizing. I remember it involved – as in Neuromancer – a big fight with an AI which used a 3D realtime-rendered polygon face (a very simple mesh). My 3D rendering code – with the simple flat-shaded polygon rasterization – is all in there.

In the same directory is a sprite-making program I wrote for the game (I dunno why I used that instead of a shareware pain program), and a map editor. And a couple more programs that I haven’t looked at and don’t remember what they were for. Editors or test programs, probably.

As I said, this would be a cool concept for me to dust off and revisit someday, maybe as a web game. It would be pretty easy to do. The idea still sounds like a nice fusion of ideas, though I don’t know how well the cyberpunk / “netrunner” idea would really fly today.

But the most important thing about this half-finished game is that it was at least partly responsible for my career as a game developer. This was what I showed from my “portfolio” to two prospective employers, and both companies offered me a job.

 

 

 

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