Space Adventure Game
This was a pretty sweet little adventure where you wake up on your space ship and find that you’re all alone. You explore rooms and gather inventory in a typical adventure game fashion.
Eventually, you gather up everything you need from various crew quarters and the service areas of the ship. I wrote content for screens on electronic devices you find lying about and there were quite a few easter eggs, including a running gag about some sort of petty feud between two of the crewmembers.
I was particularly proud of the main puzzle, which required you to remove the energy cells from one of the electronics and use them to charge a weapon you find elsewhere.
Then you head up to the bridge where the darned aliens who killed your crewmates are waiting for you. If you got everything you need, you’ll be able to blast the aliens to heck and take over the ship and make it home.
It died
Since it was written in PHP, the game finally died when one of the deprecated features it was using stopped working in 2017 and I retired it along with all of the other server-side PHP stuff.
My 2017 self wrote this here: "I am working on a replacement. It will be a re-write of the original game, The Iron Guppy. I won’t promise anything, but you may want to take a look back here in a month or so."
LOL, sorry 2017 self. You had starry eyes and big ideas, but you weren’t as good at actually getting stuff done as I am.
JavaScript replacement(s)
The new engine will be entirely JavaScript-based
Watch this space.
But don’t hold your breath.
And know that I want very badly to finish that project.
It’s just in a big queue.
But don’t give up hope.
I do actually get things cleared out of the queue.
Update 2023-12-01: I’m finally working on the third generation. Maybe this time’s the charm! See it HERE.