SteveJump | Devpost

The game running on my G3. Note that when this picture was taken (6 minutes before the deadline), moving the platform randomly didn't work.

Table 20

Inspiration

I bought an iMac G3 a few months ago, and thought it would be funny to make a game for it.

What it does

It's a very barebones Doodlejump clone with a single platform that you can jump on. If you miss it, you fall into the abyss (until the integers overflow)

How we built it

The final version was built with SDL 1.2 (SDL 2 is not supported in OS 9). It's written in C, but it isn't really "scary" C since I didn't bother with any game features that would require arrays or whatever.

Challenges we ran into

So.

Initially, I wanted to use Mac OS's native frameworks for drawing graphics. For drawing specifically, this is QuickDraw. Ideally, you want to make a window to draw in (though this isn't required, every Mac OS 9 program gets access to just draw anywhere on the screen without a window). I just could not get a window returning, the function just returned null even when copying example code from various books. I even switched to OS X briefly and had the same issue with the get window function (GetNewCWindow specifically). It should also be noted that Apple's technical documentation on these frameworks comes in 1000 page PDFs (one for QuickDraw, two for Macintosh Toolbox, which handles windows), and the sample code is in Pascal.

After utterly giving up with this approach (even if I could get a window, double buffering is practically required and is an utter pain to do), I decided to switch to SDL. Within 30 minutes, I had a perfectly double buffered window that I could draw in. It even supported full screen!

Sadly, soon after, I hit the point where I was just too tired to continue. At this point, I just about had an image of Steve Jobs's forehead rendering, with no game whatsoever. I did mostly nothing for a few hours, and went home at 7am for a nap.

I got back at 11am, with one hour to actually make a game. I'd say I did decently here, given that my previous HackNotts entry wasn't exactly a game and broke on real hardware. I implemented basic collision detection (thank you random guide I copied from), and the absolute essentials for jumping and moving the platform randomly.