Click here to listen to Hit 'n' Run's background music (in mp3) while you read this.
As part of our computer science curricullum, senior BS majors were required to take 2 classes for graduation. They were "Software Engineering" and "Senior Design" where "Senior Design" was essentially an extension of "Software Engineering".
Software Engineering, I must say, was probably the most worthless class I've ever had to take. It consisted of writing up the design specs for our senior design project. Typing out Software Requirement Specifications, and Data Dictionaries was not my idea of a good time. Now that I think of it, me, Ed, and Jason waited till the last minute, and then just threw some stuff together. I believe we also received an 'A' in that course -- which proves once again how worthless the class and the teacher were.
I chose Ed and Jason as partners, mainly because they were the coolest people I knew in class.... And also, because they were the only one's who agreed to work with my kind (joking). The first thing we decided as a group was to devise a project that would be fun to work on. While others chose mind-numbing projects involving the prediction of vapor molecules in clouds, we decided to create something that would eventually numb the mind of the user. A video game seemed the perfect choice.
We finally decided on a top-down scrolling game that closely resembled others in it's genre (Spy Hunter). Ed came up with the name. We liked it right off the bat -- HIT & RUN. But that wasn't all that was needed to make a game that attracted the customers interest..... We also needed a cool intro screen. I was the one that came up with this. I collect "Heavy Metal" magazine, and often they publish "The Gypsy". The Gypsy is a trucker/survivor living in a future / post-ozone layer-depleted land. We felt he was a perfect role model for our game.... That, and the image showed him flashing a really cool, big gun. Our game was well on it's way.
We split up the work, and everything went pretty smoothly. I worked on the scrolling piece, and some of the boundary detection. Ed worked alot on graphics, weapons control and detection, and correcting most of my mistakes. Jason worked on the menus and user interfaces. I couldn't have picked a better group.
Everything worked pretty well. We didn't get everything put into the game (oil spills, spikes, land-mines, etc), but we did churn out a pretty good game. We used the GNU C, C++ compiler written for DOS (which we found worked well under windows also), and Allegro - A game development library written for the GNU compiler.
In the end, everything worked out well. We all received an 'A' on our project, and I now have something totally uninteresting to add to my resume. Check out the game. Send comments or questions to me or Ed (emandy - AT - triticom - D.0.T. - com). Just don't harrass us about our code! ;)
All files include the appropriate source code.
