🚀 go-pugleaf

OK, folks, it seems there are at least a few of us who work with Macs and
are interested in writing games.  What have people done?  What neat little
toys have you come up with?

I've got three projects that I spend what little free time I have on.

One if a game a lot like Lode Runner, you run around a single screen area
picking up little treasures while being chased by evil bad guys. Like all
three projects, this one is written in MacApp (in C++ with MacApp, to be
more exact).  I've got all the basics working, but it just looks ugly.
The animation proved to be a killer.  Basically, I implemented the game
screen as a fixed number of positions and I never found an easy way to
animate moves between them.  That is, if you're at location 100,100 and
move to 99,100, I just erase one position and redraw the other.  It looks
really ugly, but it did let me experiment with MacApp (it was my first
MacApp program).

Another project I started (but probably won't ever finish) is a simple
Ultima-like program.  You wander around a world, get chased by various
nasties, explore cities, dungeons, and gather plunder.  A good piece of
it works (you can wander around, pick things up, and fight monsters),
but I got distracted by offscreen bitmaps (they kinda failed for this
program, but are neat tools once you understand how they work).  Once
again, the game was hampered by my utter lack of any artistic skill.

The leisure project I currently spend time on is Tetris clone.  Just a
simple, every day Tetris clone.  The hook is that I want to get it
working and release the source (since no one seems to have let any source
code for Mac games out).  It's a good way to blow off stress and would
be nice to get out into the world.

So what have other people done?  What problems did you run in to?  What
clever hacks did you come up with?  I'd love to hear them.

dank