Game Programming: Ruins

One of my first finished programs was Ruins, completed when I was 13 years old. Written in Qbasic, Ruins is limited by the Qbasic memory ceiling of 64k for all video data. Despite this limitation, however, Ruins boasts some impressive capabilities and features. Ruins' virtual environments are fully destructible and deformable on a per-pixel level. Particle effects play a large role in the game, powering sandslides that fall from above and blanket the environment. Ruins has varied, complicated and fully-animated enemies including bats, spiders and ghosts that follow the player and react to their environment. The level system is completely modular, allowing environments to be loaded from array data, and open-ended gameplay stressing creative thinking to accomplish certain goals. After designing many Ruins levels, I renamed the game to Tombe, meaning 'to fall' in French. Coincidentally, it is also 'tomb' with an e.

Qbasic is required to play Tombe/Ruins.
Click here to download Qbasic [1.11mb]

Click here to download Tombe.bas [66K]

To run Tombe.bas, first run Qbasic and open Tombe.bas from the File->Open menu. Then hold SHIFT and press F5 to run.
Windows XP users may have to set compatibility mode to Windows 95 or 98.

Screenshots: (click for a larger version)