Childhood games

If anyone remembers the original Prince of Persia you'll know this is a rip off of that. It has skeletons, ghosts, zombies and a great big wolf that chases you... which is itself an idea pinched from Alone in the Dark. 

It's a 6 level one-player game in 16 colours

Beings is like Lemmings from the point of view of an individual lemming, though these chaps are more like beans with hats. Like Lemmings it is a puzzle game to find your way to the exit before the time runs out. The landscape is deformable, you can blow it up with bombs. 

Unlike lemmings it also has a two-player mode where you fight each other by lobbing bombs and placing mines which sink into the ground. There are about 20 levels and four two-player arenas. 

I had 3D rendered version of this title screen at one point, perhaps it was for the full player game, the final ten levels.

The two-player Beings was so popular that I made a dedicated multiplayer game in the same vein, it is Lemmings meets Doom death match. Guns, ammo and health all surface randomly on the map, you have to collect it before your opponents to help you take them out. You start with a fairly lame pistol then can pick up a club, a shotgun, bombs and a rocket launcher, which can destroy the landscape. The first to five kills wins the level and there are three levels. A little running heart monitor indicates your health, with the pulse decreasing to a flat-line when you run out, an original idea at the time. 

The game is an advance on the others, allowing animations over a background (by writing my own image rendering assembly), an additive effect on the main menu selection, 256 colours, palette cycling, screen fades and proper keyboard input. There are far more animation frames, characters have momentum and it is fairly unusual in having three-player single screen play.

I was also working on AI characters, which worked quite well using just the pistol, but I didn't keep that revision in the end.