RatQuest
From Air0Day Software
RatQuest is an old-school-style RPG written in Macromedia Director.
Contents |
About
RatQuest was a project I did for an art class during undergrad. Somehow I convinced my art teacher there was artistic merit to creating a game done in the style of old PC first person RPGs, the primary inspiration being Wizardry: Bane of the Cosmic Forge, a game I used to play as a kid.
Basically, the game was created by walking around my dorm building, placing a camera on the ground, and taking a picture facing north, east, south, and west. Then I'd move the camera about a foot in a direction, and take another four pictures. These pictures became the 'map' for the main character in the game to traverse. The main character, a rat, starts in my dorm room, and can travel into my suite's common room, the floor hall, the floor kitchen, a friend's suite, the basement, the laundry room, the tunnel between my dorm and the next dorm, the other dorm's laundry room, and the trash room. It took almost 400 photographs, each one pixelated and reduced to 256 colors.
The goal of the game is to find cheese. The game's combat followed a very simple dice-rolling scheme that was dependent on experience points and stamina. The rat has five attacks (though it starts with only 2) and you only get one life (but you can save and restore using a passcode system). Most of the games graphics that did not come from my digital camera came from Ultima Underworld.
Screenshots
Here are some screenshots from the game. Yes, it's supposed to look old.
| The game's main title screen, where you enter your name. |
| Walking around. This is the hallway from my dorm room to my common room in college. |
| Combat mode. The background is the underground tunnel between my dormitory building and the adjacent one. |
How To Play
This is a very simple game. The red bar is health, the yellow bar is stamina. Every action (moving, fighting, etc) decreases your stamina. When your stamina is low, you are less likely to hit your enemies. You gain experience for each kill, and you gain levels based on experience. New levels open up additional attack options. Each attack as you go down does more and more damage, but is less and less likely to hit. You can use your turn to parry, giving you a bonus to the chance your enemy misses you. You can also try to run, which may or may not succeed.
When your health is low, you can sleep to recharge. However, there is a chance that you may be attacked while you sleep, interrupting your recharge and giving your enemy an early attack for the round.
You can save or load a game at any time, using a password system.
Download
Because the source code contains almost 400 photographs, it's extremely large (40MB). As a result, I haven't made it available yet, but I plan to eventually.
Play
You can play the game here. Please note that it uses Shockwave, not Flash. This means that Linux users, such as myself, can't play it (there's no Shockwave plugin for Linux). I honestly don't even know if this thing still works at all, since I can't test it out without borrowing someone else's computer.
