Author: Alex Szeto

I think… I think I’m done. It’s a little Vampire Survivor clone (I guess someone invented a genre title, Horde games, for this now) that started out as a one day exercise and grown to become so much more.

You can play it here or in its own dedicated window, if that’s what you prefer.

The initial concept for this game took one day to finish. Getting most of the game mechanics working took about two more weeks. The rest of the minor tweaks and balancing… took a month and a half. All in all, I’m happy about the result, especially since it actually runs relatively smoothly on real hardware once I’ve stripped out and rewritten some of the more computationally expensive components – like per-pixel accurate collision detection. I think I have literally run out of storage space to develop for actual hardware though – any major feature that I try to add would break the build file that I try to create.

This was created for my niece, Sophie, with a small cameo from her cat Jiji. Jury is still out on whether she’d like this or not. Fingers crossed!

Wall 2 was one of the first games I created, all the way back in 1996. It’s an unholy mashup of Breakout and Pong that doesn’t quite hold up in more ways than one, but I would occasionally still go back and play through its arcade mode. For one thing… it’s actually a finished game, unlike a few others that I’ve attempted to make in that era.

(warning: there’s a buzzing noise that happens when the game first loads)

I’m still amazed at how far things had come. Here’s a game running inside an emulator of an OS written in an interpreted language running inside a browser application on top of another OS.

Oh yeah, and then the sequel that came more than 20 years later somehow managed to run at a lower resolution, with less colors and features:

But it warms my heart to find a new platform that works for me after the demise of Adobe Flash. It also took far less time for me to complete this “sequel” compared to the original (days versus months).

And in the spirit of Wall 2, this is very much an introductory project for me to dip my toes in the water of a new system and platform. There’s far more interesting thing that MakeCode Arcade is capable of, in spite of its original intent as a simple block based “my first game dev” platform for young’uns.

One last bit of trivia: Wall 1 was the first game I created that used a dedicated graphics mode (13h) as opposed to building graphic blocks with ASCII characters on screen – it was literally just Pong.