ZXDWare Inc.

Happy Bob’s Saturday Night Slash Fest

This simple little coffee break game, revolving around my Happy Bob character, actually started life as an idea to make free money. Starting with an incredibly simple base, I drew all the graphics myself in a period of a few days. Once the actual game was complete, I formatted somewhere between twenty and forty floppy disks I had laying around, copied the game to each, and put a pretty label on them. Knowing that people at my school (and often in general) were impressed by anything they can’t do themselves, I took the disks to school and sold them all for fifty cents a piece. Every last copy sold, and I’d made a pretty decent profit to boot. Looking back, that was probably of questionable legality.

The original copy, released in 2005, was version 1.00. This version featured old-fashioned 16 color EGA graphics, and thus was not really all that much to look at. It came packaged with a little original tune I composed in FruityLoops 3.56 I entitled “Order vs. Chaos”, which had to be played externally during gameplay due to limitations in the actual game. Now that I’ve no more floppy disks, and further have much less desire to sell the game, it’s available for download.

In 2007, I revisited the game. While going through the folder, I came across the original full-color graphics. As I was really bored and had nothing better to do at the time, I decided to go through and give the game a facelift. After struggling for a while to get a picture-perfect palette, I finally ended up with a palette that’s almost as good. From there, it was as simple as swapping in the new images. Whyever I hadn’t done this in the first place eludes me; it’s likely because I’d been having strange memory issues and was scared doing anything beyond what I’d accomplished would break the game again. That was version 2.00, the last previous release.

Then, completely by accident, I discovered that there was a newer version of the game I’d based it off of that featured support for WAV sound via Windows’ sound system. Since the site doesn’t have much original content at the moment, I figured that I’d just slap the full color graphics in, edit the program a bit, and have a new release ready in an hour or so. What ended up happening was a two day debacle involving a very helpful fellow now credited in the enclosed readme who went so far as to try and expand the pages of the program, whatever that means. Now, the fruit of our labor is here. For the first time ever, version 3.00 is available for download.

Story:

It was two in the morning, and all was quiet. The people were tucked away safe in their homes, all snug in their beds, resting up for the next day’s activities. Or at least, the better majority of them were. One Robert Mitchell Reginald was not snug in his bed, and he wasn’t tucked away safe in his home; in fact, he was out wandering around aimlessly. He couldn’t sleep, so he had decided to investigate an abandoned subway tunnel he’d come upon the day previous.

He had been crawling through the sewer, looking for a place that wasn’t filthy he could curl up and take a nap, when he came upon a crumbling wall. The city wasn’t famous for taking care of it’s sewer, so it was nothing amazing. What was of interest was the fact that there was another wall beyond it that was also crumbling, and looked to be more recent and far sloppier. Beyond it, a tunnel seemed to stretch on forever. But he’d had no time then, he was too tired. He continued on his way.

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