The High School Years

These are the things I put together throughout high school, instead of having a life. Unfortunately, all the following are windows only, but I've gotten them all to run in Linux under Wine. All downloadable work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License, which basically means you may share it, but you must credit me by linking to this site (http://www.snapperthetwig.com).

Hover Racers Series (2003 – 2004)

Hover racers is a simple racing game that I made when I was 13. You take your levitating car, and try to outrun a grey UFO in races. The game is complete and avaliable for download.

Hover Racers (2003) (935kb zip)

Hover Racers II was a major leap forward that I made a year later. This racing game is very different from its predecessor. It features bigger tracks, faster cars and power-ups such as nitro and missiles. This contains 7 single player tracks, 7 two player tracks, 1 secret track and 4 battle arenas. This game is also complete and avaliable for download..

Hover Racers II (2004) (1.5Mb zip)

The Gamer Warfare Universe (2003 - Present)

The Gamer Warfare universe was the first and most in-depth that I have created. The story revolves around a group of gamers who have invented self-replicating machines and use these in their quest for world domination. They are opposed by Team Evil, a separatist group who use mutated creatures to prosecute their interests. Finally there are the Republics, the remnants of the normal world governments.

The technology employed by these factions trees follow caricatures of the three main branches of science. The Gamers are the physicists, they use and futuristic technologies such as weaponised plasma, energy shields and travelling through hyperspace. Team Evil are the biologists, with the mutant armies and biological computers. The Republics are the chemists, who just try to blow stuff up.

The ultimate goal of The Gamers is transhumanist transfer of all human conciseness to a place called “Gamertopia”, a virtual reality where life is literally a game. The Evil want to terraform the world in order to make a real-life Planet of Nerdcraft. The Republics want to return world power back to the rich and influential.

After picking up how to make games, the first big project was an RTS in 2003. Nothing significant came to fruition: The AI consisted of stationary units that shot random bullets. Due to a lack of knowledge as to how to animate sprites (hey, I was twelve!), the basic units were symmetrical, a feature that is present to this day with (Gunbots, Clawbots). Throughout the years, I have made a series of small mini-games (mainly split-screen games that I made my long-suffering friends play). The final 2D mini-game was Gamer Warfare Claw (which can be found on the old-projects download page), a game that has all the features of the mini-games.

A working demo of Gamer Warfare Claw can be found here.

Gamer Warfare Claw (2004 - Incomplete) (711kb zip)

Gamer Warfare WTF (Weapons Testing Facility), a 3D voxel+ game in 2007 created in Basic4GL. (I define a voxel+ Game as a voxel game (think of the old Minecraft Creative), but with non-cube blocks, such as animated elevators). The objective was to design a robot, and take it to battle. Respawning would cost the player money equal to the cost of the bot designed. Victory could be determined by either who scores the most kills, or who lasted the longest with a pool of money. This was also my first networked multiplayer game, however it was discontinued to due low-lying glitches in the network code.

Gamer Warfare: Weapons Testing Facility (2007)

The latest project in the Gamer Warfare universe was the online browser-based MMORTS by the name "Gamer Warfare" (2008-2011) (Okay, its not a HS project, but this is the most logical place to mention it). Gameplay consisted of running a nations economy (Gamer, Evil or Republic), and ordering units on the Brigade level around to capture territory off other players. The game at its peak, bragged 14 players. While being a public beta, I did not advertise it much as I was reluctant to release it until I considered it to be good enough (damn perfectionism!). The game is no longer running (Php is parsing the scripts correctly any more :S), but it may make a return in the future in a different form...

ThingyQuest (2005 - 2006)

ThingyQuest was the working name of a RPG that was under production from 2005 – 2006. Refugees from the world depicted in Gamer Warfare escape the world via giant rings near the magnetic poles powered by the aura, and find themselves on a series of worlds in the Andromeda Galaxy. However, the refugees have a problem: The galaxy is occupied by dragons whom try to keep them subjugated.

In the ThingyQuest universe, electricity and magic are mutually exclusive – use of electrical devices cause magic to become ineffective. Some colonies embraced magic in order to protect themselves, others went fully technological.

ThingyQuest (2006)

The game slowly progress and stagnated. The main problem was a lack of direction, and a lack of confidence in the project as a whole due to my lack of artistic ability. So naturally I tried to make it again with it in 2d.

ThingyQuest 2D (2006)

TwigRis (2007)

Twigris started as a game on my calculator. When it spread like wildfire at my school, I naturally moved to port it to PC. The objective is to make rows of the same number to score points. For example, a row of 7 sevens will score 49 points, and 5 fives 25. The version you see was put together in 2 hours.

TwigRis (2007) (551kb)

Gwitters (2007)

Gwitters was the last game I made during highschool, and the only one that I sneakily put together on my laptop during class. It was a rare success – a project that I not only start, but also finish. Its based on a card game I invented back in the very early 2000's. In Gwitters you have two decks, one for monster cards, and one for support cards. Monsters attack each other, and the first player to score 7 kills wins. Cards (both monster and support) level up as you use them. The game supports multiplayer over LAN/Internet and replays.

Gwitters (2007) (5.3Mb zip)

TwigMp3 (2004 - 2006)

Finally there is TwigMp3 – a minimalist mp3 player I threw together to listen to music while I worked on all these projects.

TwigMp3 (2006) (303kb zip)

Various Small Projects

These projects were either never completed, or are just very small. These are here pretty much just because they've always been on my site. Most likely they were works in progresses that got abandoned.