Chrysalis is a game a friend (Eric Sambach) and I wrote in 1994, just out of high school.

We sent this game to Epic MegaGames for consideration, but without success (and they hadn’t even seen the source). Ouch.

The Game

I really thought the game itself could have been great. It centered around an amorphous blob of green slime (which wasn’t as ugly as it sounds) that could assume the shape and powers of defeated opponents. Only a limited number of shapes could be stored, and the various powers had to be used to solve puzzles and bypass obstacles.

The Engine

The source is horrendous. Almost zero encapsulation. Globals everywhere. You get the picture.

There is C, C++, Objective-C, Intel-style assembler, and GNU-style assembler.

The game ran only on 320x200 256-bit indexed video surfaces, initially supporting only DOS (using the Watcom C++ compiler and mode 13), and the Linux console (via svgalib). A friend (Brian Spilsbury) from #c on EFnet later wrote an X11 surface. We divided the 256 colour palette into a 6x6x6 RGB cube, which allowed us to easily compute fade transitions, though limited the fidelity of images somewhat.

The underlying graphics library was largely equivalent to SDL, but preceded its public release by about four years. It supported full clipping, transparent images, virtual pages, bitmapped text fonts, circle and line (Bresenham) primitives. It also included a full windowing system with transparency, used for the Chrysalis level editor.

Assembler was used for the low-level rendering primitives. 16-bit and 8-bit fixed-point number classes were used for all coordinates.

As a sign of its vintage, the game implements nearly everything from scratch and has almost no external dependencies, primarily because there were very few available. The STL didn’t exist, nor did SDL, or any number of other libraries that would have saved us a lot of time.

The Visuals

The art I created was quite nice too, I thought, though lost now, buried inside the proprietary packed file format we created.

The game itself used four-layer parallax scrolling. The play layer was the second from the front. Each layer faded off slightly more, to ensure it didn’t intrude too much visually.

Entities in the game could be animated, such as the water and vines in creature.cc.

Last Words

If anybody has an old Linux machine lying around and can run the binaries (which are included on GitHub), I’d love a screenshot.

I can't recommend the Big Picture enough. If only more papers would do the same.

As a bonus to keyboard users, try using j/k to cycle through the images.

"This is the problem with Australian politicians. They are under the false impression that they are elected to make decisions for the people. Not on behalf of the people. In Australia there is no government of the people by the people. It is government of the people by the chosen few. This is underlined by the fact that he uses the word "I" more frequently than anything else." Sarah from the STOP Censorship ML, via Somebody Think of the Children.