Miscellaneous Whatevers

The AquinaCorp plug-in integrates a set of four original starships into the Escape Velocity 'universe' (which the player can also purchase at select shipyards, depending on tech level) There are no missions.

Apart from the garish yellow AquinaCorp livery, I've otherwise gone out of my way to ensure that these ships realistically 'fit' with the existing EV complement. This includes descriptions, appropriate armament and pricing, modifications to existing 'dude' resources and (of course) nifty 3D graphics. But if you're someone who enjoys tweaking with EVEdit, go right ahead and hack away. The AquinaCorp ensemble are as follows:

Dragonfly: A light, very effective escort/fighter.
Geronimo: A slow 'luxury liner.'
Aztlan: A large, multi-functional bulk freighter.
Nomad: An extremely fast "jumbo" cargo ship powered by a tiny black hole.

These are some games and animations I made with GameMaker, between (I think) the winter of 1986 to fall of 1988. The files themselves were unfortunately spread out over a dozen badly-labeled 5-inch floppies. But thanks to the modern development of Commodore 64 emulators, they've been organized here as four .D64s of compiled programs executable from BASIC -- and one .D64 with all the programming nuts and bolts, for those still interested in such things. Some utterly gratuitous info on individual files:

BUGOUT -- A shoot-em-up... and without question the BEST work I did with the entire GM suite. I mean, just making those eight-direction sprites and wrangling an impressive 'raybeam' effect alone took a couple of weeks.

ALIENX -- This game I was fairly proud of too, as it sported an actual background (whoa!) decent animation, and a working method of keeping the player within that durned playfield. No, setting the sprite movement to 'zero' never, EVER worked...

STORY1 -- This Crossbow-ish shooting gallery was the first installment in a planned series of arcade games featuring a story 'cut scene' in the beginning. My idea was that you'd have to get through each trial successfully in order to obtain a code to 'unlock' the next one. Unfortunately, my programming chops weren't up to linking them all.

STORY2 -- Second installment, air combat over a futuristic cityscape. Never finished.

CHASE -- My first short animation with GM... a Han Solo type taking refuge from a pseudo-Stormtrooper. No logic exhibited whatsoever. I mean, if he was FROZEN, a la Terminator II, why not just hit 'em with a hammer? Ah well.

MOVIE1 -- Another flick, featuring purple-haired punk rawkers flaunting ghettoblasters (anyone remember those?) uptight businessmen with Transformer attache cases, and redheaded babes.

MOVIE2 -- Still another animation. Yup, aliens that subscribe to TRULY oddball religions, abysmal automobile driving... and a brief nanosecond of female nudity. Whoo-hoo!

DRAGON -- Clearly unfinished movie. I remember having big, big plans with this, but all the reptilian sprites I created killed the project, memory-wise.

CARWAR -- Inspired by Steve Jackson's RPG offering. Otherwise, your average run-of-the-mill excuse to have two players noisily shoot at each other.

ARK -- Simple game concept, a spaceship going from planet to planet and beaming frisky endangered critters aboard. Not really much to it, but I loved that animated lightning-bolt effect.

GIRL -- My attempt at building a functional Habitat/Lucasfilm interface, using a conveniently cute goth girl as an avatar.

CAVEAT -- Demo version of an unrealized Mario Bros/Lode Runner type game. (Apparently back then I had a strange obsession with finding the most visually impressive way to make a player disintegrate...)