zenipex Games

Coriolis Station

(Summer 2012, with Isaiah Hines and Miller Tinkerhess)

This was a collaboration over the course of 12 days at Sid Meier's Game Design Boot Camp

This is a 2D platformer set on a rotating space station. The puzzles are centered around the altered gravity mechanics.

It's (perhaps) best played with an Xbox 360 controller, but it can be played just fine with a mouse and keyboard. The game should run on Windows XP, Mac OS 10.7, and recent versions of Linux.

As I best as I recall: I focused on the gravity mechanics, the Xbox 360 controller input and vibration, mouse and keyboard input, pixel perfect rendering (including the star field), and the first play area; Isaiah focused on the platformer mechanics and interactable objects, as well as the second play area; and Miller focused on the art (including the particle system), audio, our awesome in-game editor (disabled in the release), and on later areas of the game.

This release is using zenilib revision 859, almost zenilib 0.5.0.0.

A mini-documentary about the boot camp: Sid Meier Game Design Boot Camp

A fun follow-up article on the boot camp: Students experience 'boot camp' with legendary game designer Sid Meier

Flag Wars

(Fall 2007)

You start the game with a flag in your hand that you swing into other flags to convert them to your side. The flags start at level 1 loyalty which increases with time to level 10, which can be determined by observing the height of the flag on the pole. Flags with higher loyalty can defeat flags with lower loyalty more easily. Collisions between flags will damage both flags' loyalty but the higher loyalty flag will lose less loyalty compared to the lower one. The flag that is held by the avatar has an increased attack strength in that you can defeat flags more easily than an unheld flag could. If your flag's loyalty becomes too low you can drop it to pick up another flag that is under your control with higher loyalty. Avoid colliding with enemies to keep your avatar's speed up.

Perilous Seas

(Fall 2007)

This was my arcade game for EECS 494, game development. It is a naval combat game in which you sail around the seven seas, firing cannonballs and sinking any ships which dare to stand in your way. You are supposed to play the game with a Hori Real Arcade Pro 3. If you have one, you rotate the stick to turn your ship.

Zeni Rocket

(Summer 2007)

The main concept behind this game is to allow a user to simply customize a spaceship by placing rockets wherever and to allow a user to simply change controls schemes for these rockets as well. The physics are mostly complete (though a better symplectic integrator might be helpful). Customization is now ready to go. You just need to edit or replace scene1.txt. An XML-style format would probably still be preferable... Maybe later.

Debugger

(February 2007)

The code name was Robots vs The Bugs. This is the essence of the game. Two players control one robot each - specifically one humanoid lawn mower each. The object of each level of the game is to kill all of the bugs on the level by attacking them with your spinning blades. The original goal of the game, overall, was to save the robot princess. This goal might be added back in if we ever find a decent amount of time to work on this again.

Zeni Maze

(Summer 2006)

At present, this is best described as a demonstration of the game engine that I'm currently working on. In the future, this game could potentially allow one to explore a maze that could not, in reality, exist. For example, a maze could allow one to take four tight left turns and end up somewhere different than where one started.

Lucid Dreams - The Struggle to Awaken

(November 2005)

The setting of this game is a cloud in a dream world. Your objective is to obtain ten caffeine pills in order to wake up. To this end, you must catch the sleeping pills that sheep throw at you, back at the sheep. Once they are asleep, you can take whatever pills they happened to have on them.

Battleship (Java Applet)

(Summer 2004)

This Battleship game has pretty cool AI! It doesn't even cheat like my old C++ text-console version of Battleship did... I would even go so far as to call this AI reasonably sophisticated. Any feedback is appreciated. (Nothing about how you honestly believe that it cheats though preferably. Trust me, it does NOT cheat...) Actually, the AI is still missing a tiny bit of functionality that would make it perfect. If the AI has hit two ships and sinks one, it does not try to determine which volley of shots sunk the ship. Instead, it just keeps firing at both. It is not as bad as it sounds, but it has been some time since I have worked on it, and I am probably not going to get around to adding said functionality. Sorry.

Also, as it is a Java applet, it requires the Java VM (version 1.5 or newer).