A clone of the Windows 3.1 game Mordor: Depths of Dejenol. A simple yet deep dungeon crawler game.
The story is that I had an urge to play Mordor after having not played it in a very long time. The problem was that I was on a Mac and the game was for Windows 3.1. A few clones existed, but nothing that would help me out. So I decided to take it on myself and build it in Java to avoid the problem in the future. Conveniently it ended up serving as a demonstration of my capacity as a game programmer and helping me get my first job in the industry.
It also provided one of my favourite entering the industry anecdotes. In an interview for a different job at the same time I was asked (prefaced with the understanding it isn’t a great measure), how many lines of code it was: 1000? 2000? At that point it was well past 16 000. When I said that there was a long pause from the interviewer (in its final state it was 33k, if curious) which I attribute to misunderstanding that while I was technically a student, I wasn’t exactly new to programming (I had started self teaching c++ more than a decade prior, and even Java a good 7 or 8 years before).
Although it was built as a clone, and used the originals assets (I had no intention to release a build; just wanted to be able to play) I did take some liberties with the game. By far the biggest was to build a lot of the systems to be heavily extendable. With the editor you could do everything from adding new monsters, items, spells, etc. to new maps, tiles, etc.. I even had a rough design for a system to allow limited new spell effects and AI in game. The other more memorable thing I managed to do was build a rudimentary 3D renderer in Java Swing (using the painter’s algorithm and my old copy of the Black Art of 3D programming). I managed to wrangle the images to get enough performance to render at a decent frame rate even.
August Junkala 