Depot Games: Purple Martians

Current Version: 5.0

Project Status: Completed

Highest Popularity: #5 during November 2007

Links: Web Site, Purple Martians Downloads Page

Category: Platform

Developers: Michael Weiss

Number of Players: 2 (Split Screen)

Ports: Windows

Source Code: Available

Author's Description: A really cool platform game like Bubble Bobble, Lode Runner, or Super Mario.

Its completely free!!

Features:
- the game works identically in Linux and Windows
- two players can play at the same time
- 35 huge levels (plus you can build more!)
- 3 difficulty levels (easy, normal, hard)
- user defineable setup for keyboard and/or joystick
- sound effects and a soundtrack by Russel Hoy
- bombs you can carry and throw
- rockets you can ride and steer
- lots of bad dudes and items that are completely customizable with the level editor
- zooming game map (looks cool)

And the best feature of all: The Level Editor to make your own levels!

System Requirements:
Processor: Pentium or better
You can get more speed by choosing a smaller screen size (but its more fun to play with larger one)
Memory: 8M (might work with less, never tried)
Disk Space: 5M
The game supports eight screen resolutions: (320x200, 320x240, 640x400, 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024 and 1600x1200)

The level editor supports three:
(640x480, 800x600, and 1024x768)

If you download it, please take a few minutes to send me some feedback.

And if you create new levels, you simply must send them to me as well. The only levels I get to play are ones that I created myself, and how challenging could that be?

Send your comments to:
mweiss@slb.com
Email me your new levels as e-mail attachments.

Happy gaming.

P.S. How this game came to be.
I was sitting there one night, playing Bubble Bobble, (I had just discovered MAME) and I decided to search the internet for some game tools. What I found was djgpp, Allegro, and thus began my introduction to the open source movement. I love it. I can't stress that enough. Open systems are so awesome, adjectives fail me. I had been trying to write a video game since elementary school in the 70's when I taught myself BASIC on the Commodore PET. Then I moved to the Apple II and learned some assembly, but I still couldn't write the game I wanted. As soon as it got barely complex enough to be interesting, it ground to a halt. So with djgpp and Allegro I finally had all the tools I needed. The only catch was, I had to learn C. Which I did. It is the most elegant language I've used yet, just learning it helped me program more methodically, logically, elegantly, than I ever did in BASIC or assembly. I wrote this game as I was learning C in the late 90's.

I have been making minor improvements to the game, and in
the next release I will have network multiplayer capability.

The project is completely C++ now and although I don't use any objects, I would like to redo a lot of the project with objects someday...

Thanks to using 99% Allegro functions to create the program,
I was able to port it to linux with only minor changes.

Russel Hoy wrote some music for the game that I use as background music for the game. I use the music library DUMB
to play the music in both windows and linux. I have not been
able to get a hold of Russell for years now, if anyone knows
how to contact him please let me know.

Downloads

Name	Comments	Size	Date
pm_50_dx_full.zip		1,554,197	01/23/2007 12:14 AM
pm_50_lx_full.tar.gz		1,104,862	01/23/2007 12:13 AM

What's New:

5.0
- Works identically under Linux and Windows
- Two players can play simultaneously
- A new soundtrack by Russel Hoy
- Entire project is now C++ (even though it uses no objects!)
- Numerous minor bugfixes