Ablaze V.I.

Ablaze V.I. is a silly idea gone mad. What initially began as a joke - 80 by 50 pixels low-resolution games for people with very bad eye-sight - got rewritten, extended, expanded, and redesigned into this weird game. Because I am primarily a programmer, this silly resolution enabled me to design much of my own graphics relatively quickly without them looking 'too shabby' (some of the graphics were borrowed from older hobby projects of me and my friends). It also enabled me to focus mainly on gameplay aspects (interaction, structuring and conceptual complexity) without having to spend much time on low-level optimization.

The game itself is a classical horizontal 2D shoot'em-up with a comedy twist such as Konami's Parodius. Thematically this game takes shape in many forms of 'inside jokes' shared between me and my dear friends such as their dislike of Star Trek and their fondness of absurd humour.

The more noticeable features in this game are:

• Complex and extensive end-boss fights (one of the boss-monsters is a spider-mech which walks backwards through a spiralling tunnel system using some simple inverse kinematics).
• A level containing time-travel gameplay where the game can rewind itself 10 seconds back into the past.
• Record and replay feature.
• (Screen-saver mode).

This was a great hobby project to do, I really had great fun thinking up all sorts of silly enemies; drawing them in a 80x50 environment and then coding them. In fact I just couldn't stop adding stuff when I maybe should have. But this way I gained valuable experience, both in the areas of game design and programming in the DirectX/Win32 environment.

AblazeVI.zip (63 MB)

Download the full Ablaze V.I. game here. After the download is complete, unzip it using WinZip or similar tools and run Setup.exe. This will install the game using Install Shield and enable you to access the game and help documents through the normal Windows menus and safely de-install it through the Windows control pannel. Have fun!