About Contact
Contact is a revolution new first person shooter game. It was written entirely in native Qbasic (no libraries). I wrote Contact for my senior project, and it grew into an incredible game. It is my first serious attempt at a game. Sure I've written simple pong games, but who hasn't. For a first game it is really good, it's good for any game.
Features include:
- 10-15 FPS
- multiple weapons: revolver, machine gun, laser gun, flame thrower
- ultra-high resolution sprites
- 320*200*8bit resolution with an off-screen buffer
- movie player to tell story
- wav player
- good resolution wall and floor textures
- flawless multikey routine
*1st person view of machine gun, revolver from Halo. 3rd person view of Spartica from Contra 3.
*Contact will be re-released using Inspiration after Contact 2 is
Reviews
http://home.hetnet.nl/~nebula/articfls/sreview2.html - review by Nebula Software
http://www.petesqbsite.com/sections/express/issue3/ - article in QB Express
waiting for review by Vplanet and QbNewZealand to go up
Screenshots
All screenshots are taken directly from some point in the game.
A little trigger happy.
Stargazing.
Must get to the armourie, but how?
BOOM!
Stowing away.
I'm hit!
Oh the humanity, its a bloodbath
Ah, it burns!
Downloads
trailer.zip - (205KB) Take a look at this trailer. It is taken from actual game-play (except for text). The sound didn't carry over to the video, but it's there in the game.
contact.zip - (4.52MB) Here it is!
Pre-Contact
Contact was originally going to be an overhead shoot-em-up like the second level of Contra. All of the characters would have been there, the Deconan, the penquis, the Sentinels, and the IGSV. There was also going to be a large creature that looked similar to an Elite in Halo, called a Ninjian. Whenever you entered a room with one of these the game would morph from an over head shooter to a kung fu game and then once the Ninjian was defeated it would morph back. It was also originally to have a space ship shooter like Asteroids in the very beginning of the game before the ship was boarded.
This was before I had even known that a raycaster could be written in Qbasic. Once I saw a raycaster, the overhead design went out the window. For this second write through the Ninjians and the Asteroids knock were still there. After playing Mace Griffen bounty hunter I realized what a bad idea it was to combine a first person shooter with a space ship shooter, so that was scrapped. The Ninjians, while I still really like the idea, would be too hard to make in 3d and with the rest of the game now in 3d and 2d fighting section would drag the game down. So I settled on the simple first person shooter.
I studied multiple Qbasic raycasting code until I felt that I could build my own, then I set out doing it. I also set out redesigning the maps. The overhead view would have allowed me to have many many small tile textures, that would have to be cut back now that they were 64x64. I had to cut the story down a long bit too. From there Contact grew and grew into the game that it ended up being in April of 04.