Destiny

Controls

• Navigation: arrow keys
• Confirm: enter
• Pause menu: space
• Use sword: z

Author's notes

This game was a tech demo for a game engine I was designing back in 2007. As such...there isn't much game here, just a few assorted things to play with: three different types of (shell)fish, a sword, a cookie, a rock, and a piece of seaweed. I wasn't really sure what type of game I wanted this to be, so I just added enough things that I could test the various features I wanted. Of course, I also always wanted to make a game set underwater, but other than this...I never ended up doing that, huh.

The main difference between this game and the original C implementation (apart from the length--how the heck was this originally 1700 lines of code!?) is that, unlike that game, this game is entirely 2D. The original implementation was still ASCII art, of course, it's just that you could change the orientation of the camera, suppressing one axis at a time (defaulting to a top-down view). I thought it was neat in 2007, but of course I don't think it's actually that readable in 2024. For this implementation I've settled back on the top-down approach, although I still use the "side-scrolling" form of the seaweed sprite, 'Y'.

Credits

I made this game in my personal engine, which is text-based and so has only one asset, namely the font. This font is an enlarged version of the public-domain, 6x13 variant of the "-misc-fixed-*" font, available here.