I have been doing a major rewrite of the game engine I have been working on for two years. It is tedious and most of the time it is just plain boring. I decided to create a small side project just to make things interesting for a bit. I remembered hearing about a 48 hour game coding challenge and decided to try it out for myself. Although I gave myself 48 hours, I only put in about 6 hours of actual work.

It is a simple text based game called Galaxy Quest. There is room for a ton of improvement, but I decided to stop coding at the end of the time limit. I thought I would share the end result with those of you who may be interested.

The moral of this story: When things begin to seem mundane, do something simple and silly to make it fun again!

[attachment=16182:Galaxy Quest.zip]

Edit: Although I have come close, I have not beat this game yet. If you are interested in trying, a good hint is to avoid fighting until you have a few upgrades.

Played it, got hit by an asteroid and died. Beat up some space pirates though!

Ever play Flotilla? It's a pretty fun game that has somewhat of the same concepts. The only thing is the time-limit is too short (you have cancer and are exploring the galaxy until you die... but you die from your cancer pretty quickly). The combat is super sweet also, but the game could really be improved if the developer decided to invest another few months into. A Flotilla 2 is supposedly in development - maybe it'll fix the shortcomings.

I managed to collect about 80+ pieces and had a ton of hp and upgrades. I thought I was going to win but that asteroid took me out as well! Thanks for trying it out! I checked out Flotilla just now. Seems to be somewhat like 3D chess and I like that a lot. I will definitely keep checking the progress made on Flotilla 2 now. Thanks for the link.

Wow, this is really good, although I got my butt kicked by space pirates. Keep up the good work, and good luck on your engine!

My 10th run or so went really well, then I encountered a black hole ... and rage quitted. Gotta admit though that I am not a big fan of text-based games(yeah I read your whole post after playing).

Also how does armor work, it seems like every 5pts reduce damage by one point, wouldn't it be easier to just give one point of armor upgrade instead?

I tried to open it but I get an error saying it is not a valid win32 application. What does that mean?

My 10th run or so went really well, then I encountered a black hole ... and rage quitted. Gotta admit though that I am not a big fan of text-based games(yeah I read your whole post after playing).

Also how does armor work, it seems like every 5pts reduce damage by one point, wouldn't it be easier to just give one point of armor upgrade instead?

Armor stat represents the percentage of damage that is mitigated. When I added that mechanic to the game, I had the intent of adding different armor and weapon items that could be equipped by the player and by the space pirates. I ran out of time before I could add that so I just added +5 upgrades that could be found as you travel instead.

I tried to open it but I get an error saying it is not a valid win32 application. What does that mean?

I compiled this without thinking of turning the Windows XP compatibility option on in Visual Studio 2012. I have been using Windows 7 for a few years and tend to forget that a lot of people haven't jumped on that bandwagon. You must have the runtime components installed in order to run any program compiled with Visual Studio 2012 (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30679). I compiled an XP compatible version for you. I will have to dust off my old XP laptop in order to test it out, but here is a link anyway. Maybe you can confirm it works before I have to do that.

[attachment=16189:Galaxy Quest.zip]