                                ~ Pyrotrash ~

Welcome to my interpretation of the news. Consider it a tribute to the poor
men who died in the mine: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4636098.stm

The fire effect, the miners' movements, and the player animation and shooting
direction on ladders are a bit dodgy, and the game is probably unbalanced in
many ways; but considering I wrote the whole damn thing and drew all the
graphics before I tested any of it, I don't think I did badly at all!


                                ~ Compiling ~

Dependencies:

- Allegro
- HawkNL

Otherwise pretty standard stuff. There's a makefile that should work in
Linux or in Windows with MinGW. If that doesn't work, compile src/*.cpp
specifying include/ as a place to look for include files.


                                 ~ Playing ~

Pyrotrash is a networked game. To play, you need to run a server (or use a
public one) and then have two to four people run clients. You need a computer
for each player.

I will shortly attempt to get a couple of public servers running and release
a zip containing Windows binaries and batch files.

As far as actually playing the game goes, I encourage you to find some
opponents through whatever means you have available, read the short in-game
instructions, and have a go. Everything unsaid should be self-explanatory.


                        ~ Planning and code re-use ~

I might have been able to write this whole game in 72 hours if I had booked
holiday off work and really got into it the way I do when I find out about
these competitions earlier than the night before they are scheduled to start.
But considering I only had the weekend and didn't want to mess myself up for
work (oops), I felt it was appropriate to re-use a heck of a lot of code.

First, I took Bananza, my entry to SpeedHack 2006 and a networked game.

   http://bdavis.strangesoft.net/bananza.zip
   http://bdavis.strangesoft.net/bananzawin.zip

I stripped the game out and kept all the menu and networking code. Then I
adapted it to let you choose which player to play as, and then I wrote the
game.

Once I had written pretty much everything else, I took the "stylised sparks
and smoke" effect from Sparky.

   http://bdavis.strangesoft.net/?page=sparky

I butchered it a lot in order to fit it into the game properly, but it was
still a lot quicker than implementing that effect from scratch.

I wrote all the rest of the code specifically for this project.

The curious might like to look at planning.txt. It contains anything I felt
needed planning out in plain text.

"Code re-use is an essential hacking skill." I never really understood that
before, but I do now!


                               ~ Conclusion ~

Fatso was right. I am so going to get burned.


Ben 'Bruce "entheh" Perry' Davis
http://bdavis.strangesoft.net/
