This month's project is a remake of a great retro game called XQuest. Some of you might remember it well, but I tell you that I had a hard time trying to remember its name. Anyway, I have downloaded this (free) game but it didn't run on my PC - it was too old. I have decided to give DosBox (a Dos emulator for Windows) a try and to my surprise XQuest ran great under DosBox - here's the proof:
I can see why some of you would say that the game looks kind of ugly, but the concept behind it shines: you drive your ship using the mouse, trying to collect some stuff and (hopefully) managing to survive the enemy attacks.
My remake uses a small ship, just like the original. You have to collect the green power-ups and it's a simple mission because there are no enemies in the first level. Well, if you are really looking for trouble, you can crash your ship by running into into the red level border or into the meteor, just like in the picture below:
Keep an eye on the counter in the lower right corner of the screen; it tells you how many power-ups you have collected until now. As soon as you collect them all, the orange door at the top of the level is opened, so you can get out and move on to the following level.
The second level introduces the first enemy, which is nothing more than a red sphere that moves randomly, but can crash your ship if it collides with you. The good news is that the player can fire green laser beams using the left mouse button, so that's an easy level as well.
The third level introduces a new type of enemy, a red ufo that fires red laser beams. The things are starting to get complicated in this level.
The fourth level is... well, hard. I think I have made it a bit too hard, but since it's the last level in the game, it had to be harder than the others. Fear not, for you can set players_lives to a big value inside xq.c and you'll have lots of lives to play with.
If you are lucky, you can find some extra life power-ups from time to time; just run into them to pick them up.
Try to finish the game - there's a surprise waiting for you at the end.
Believe it or not, the code is very well commented.