Operation Black Sun
Operation Black Sun is an award winning 2D-arcade-space-shooter-killing-game. You are able to move in any direction you like, you can collect weapons, use teleporters, kill other ships, play with your friend on one computer in splitmode or just have a nice time flying over or bursting lasers through green, dancing, little men which spray cute particle blood when killed.
History
This was my first PC project in C/C++, this was where I learned OOP. The code is a mess. Some files are pure C like, there is almost no encapsulation whatsoever, there are global variables everywhere, but at least the game object system uses object inheritance.
There are two versions. The official last release as DOS binary, version 0.41b. This is the version that won four awards in the Allegro Games Competition 1999:
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Best use of audio Best use of graphics Most innovative developer Best Game |
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And a never released WIP version, v0.5, that I just patched up a bit recently so it would run on windows.
It crashes when you leave a level, but it has a few new features. The most important is the afterburner, which makes controlling the ships a whole lot easier. Others are laser barriers and an unfinished system where the AI actually pathfinds it’s way to you instead of bumping into walls. That only works sporadically, though. Unfortunately the intro is missing completely from the new version, so if you want to see that you’ll have to get the 0.41b version (I made a download with DosBox included, you can just unzip and run).
Features (from the original, 1999 readme)
- 2D tile based / free scrolling / parallax / multiple viewport graphics engine
- 2 player splitscreen mode
- 32 direction moving
- keyboard is completely configurable
- support for all standard soundcards incl. WSS & Gravis Ultrasound
- resolution up to 1024*768
- animated, transparent sprite+pixel explosions
- 4 weapons with 3 upgrade levels each:
- standard MP : fast but weak
- laser : slow but strong
- proxymines : they don’t move at all, but are very dangerous good if you’re hunted down, or for confusing homing missiles
- missiles : wait until the CPU ships have them
- 4 specials just waiting to be collected
- kind of AI ( still buggy )
- super thrilling sound engine
- regions on the map, which affect ships in different ways
- ingame tutorial (singleplayer only)
- a great mapeditor
- XM-music
