So... yeah, there you go.

Since today is such a special day, I thought I'd flip things around and give you a gift! A little unorthodox but who's going to complain, right?

My last semester of college was in the fall of oh-six. One of my classes was C++ game engine development and our final project was to produce a functioning game. Any guesses where this is going? I thought it would be fun to throw together an homage to Double Dragon, so I hunkered down and churned out...

Street Brawl Evolution!!!



Aside from the music, everything in this game is from scratch. Well, with the exception of the hands and feet of my street brawlers because I fail at human anatomy. I cribbed those pieces from Dragon Ball Z: Legendary Super Warriors for the Game Boy Color. It's a simple one-level demo that places you in the role of Jade, a streetwise SNK reject who "doesn't play well with others." What story? You've got this:



Straight-up 8-bitty! Jade has a few techniques at her disposable to dispatch those pesky grunts, like the flying kick or the combo punch! Nothing fancy. If you've played Double Dragon or River City Ransom it's kinda sorta exactly like that.



You gotta make sure to beat down those guys as soon as they appear, otherwise more will crawl out from the woodwork to gang rape you.



At the end, you must square off against her evil doppelgänger (every hero needs a doppelgänger) Pandora! Lazy palette swap. It was a bear to create a sprite sheet for only two characters and I was not about to blow time on a third. No biggie.

So how can you experience Street Brawl Evolution? Right over here, all neatly gift-wrapped! A few words of warning, though. For our final presentation we had to demo the games on a computer hooked up to a projection screen. It was a controlled environment. Let me stress that. It was a controlled environment. I knew how screwy my game was! There's poor hit detection, jump height is not constant, and there is this crazy glitch that crashes the game when you lose a life, but not all the time! I was biting my lip the whole time praying that the thing didn't burn on me while I was at the podium. To play it safe, don't delete any of the source files that I've included in the game folder.

Oh, and I programmed the AI the night before it was due. Yeeeeah, kinda crucial code that shouldn't have been put off. As a result, the boss marches back and forth in hilarious fashion and it is possible to get stuck between multiple foes with no means of escape, watching as your lives deplete every so slowly. Other than that, it's all peaches.

Since I graduated, I had always fancied going back to the project and stretching it into a full-blown game, if not in C++ then in something like Game Maker. Never did. You can take a look at my code if you get off on that. In any case, enjoy!