Nurmweb3D Games

(First of all, I'm a self-schooled amateur...)

     "Nurmweb3D Games" is the current name of a solo game-programming project I started in early 2000, as a part of Nurm Web Programming. I started learning HTML in 1999 and when I learned that one of my favorite pastimes, video games, were created with similar programming languages, I dived into learning as much as I could about game programming. I became familiar with GML (Game Maker Language, developed by Mark Overmars, with similarities to Javascript) and started getting into programming 2D, 80's arcade-style games. I've dabbled in all of the following: The Games Factory, FPS Creator, The 3D Gamemaker, Game Maker & GML (Game Maker Language, within Game Maker 4 & 5), 3D Game Studio, Javascript, DirectX, Java2, Visual C++, BlitzBASIC and DarkBASIC. I have also messed with a bunch of 3D editing software: Nendo, 3D World Studio, NuGraf, AC3D, Milkshape 3D, 3D Effect Studio, Blender, Anim8or, Google Sketchup, Lightwave and of course Autodesk 3DS Max. My favorites are AC3D, Nendo and 3DS Max, but Milkshape seems pretty cool too. (For 3D Text, I highly recommend Xara3D and 3DWebButton!) For sound editing, I prefer Sound Forge XP, but also use: Cool Edit Pro, NCH Tone Generator, Switch and Cakewalk Express. All the software mentioned here has trial or demo versions which are great. Check my Fav Links page for links to the makers of all the killer game-editing software mentioned here!

UPCOMING GAME: SENTINEL SPHERE Images & videos!

FIRST 3D GAME: Nightmare Apartments: Get Out Alive! Images, Videos & Free Game Download!

SOMETHING ELSE: COMING SOON

2D GAMES [FREEWARE!]:
NOTE: Clicking on screenshot images will interrupt audiovault player
window. Close audiovault player window before clicking on screenshots.

SCREENSHOT:	DESCRIPTION:	DOWNLOAD:
	Sandfighter: Sandbomber 2 - This is a beta-demo. It has 2 complete levels and an incomplete 3rd level preview. This test version also has a level-skip cheat. Mission 3 craft speed is much faster. More of Mission 3 is available in this demo than in first release. BTW, the beam weapon in Mission 3 needs to be on a target for a few seconds to destroy it. This was my programming comeback project. Programmed in early 2007, using Game Maker 5. It uses a lot of freely available, high-quality graphics from various internet sources, as well as some original graphics. Note: Certain display ratios make the animated graphics look weird, but I'm not fixing it. Size: 3.7MB	Sandfighter: Sandb... Hosted by eSnips
	Nurm's Cherry Mastur Beta Version - (Though it's really the final version, I liked the title like that. LOL.) This is a 9-reel slot machine game that took me a year to complete. The code for the 9-reel, 8-payline win-check scripts was totally original. As far as I know, this game is glitch-free! Still my best game as of early 2007, if a little boring. Finished circa early 2003. Programmed with Game Maker 5, and makes extensive use several thousand lines of code in GML scripts. Mostly original graphics, except for a few of the fruit, but even those were altered. Bet and Spin buttons recycled from NWP Blackjack. Other button graphics made with 3DWebButton. Title graphics, reels and flashing messages made with Xara3D. Size: 2MB	Nurm's Cherry Mast... Hosted by eSnips
	NWP Blackjack - My first actually decent game. It has a few glitches though, but nothing too distracting. There is even a way to get extra money with a hard to find glitch. Basically, it's a classic blackjack game, as I couldn't find a free download of one at the time. Bonus round features a 4-reel slot machine and 25 spins to win more money. Finished mid-2002. Programmed with Game Maker 5. All original graphics, except for the card faces. Titles, message displays, bank buttons , slot machine buttons and slot machine reel graphics made with Xara3D. Game menu buttons made with 3DWebButton. Size: 3.7MB	Nurm Web Programmi... Hosted by eSnips
	Sandbomber - Fly over the desert in a B-2 Stealth bomber, or a reasonable 80's arcade facsimile thereof blowing up enemies' tanks, jeeps and flying saucers. Weapon upgrades with more points and the action keeps getting more intense until it finally overwhelms you. Finished late 2001. Game built with Game Maker 4. This was the lamest of three games from that time (but still not too bad), 2 of which are gone forever. It's mostly a cut-and-paste job on 1943-style demo, which was recoded a bit for new graphics, music and enemy actions. When you get to the 5-missile upgrade, each missile is an individual object and they keep flying until they hit something. Your missiles also destroy enemy bullets without being destroyed themselves. It's tough to get to that point and when you do, you get this badass firepower. You need it because the enemies start to get really thick. The highest score I've recorded is 7200. Beat that, you gamers! This is for 80's era arcade heads like me. In fact the theme music is a midi file of the theme to the 80's TV show Knight Rider. It's good fun for a little while. Try it, it's free! Then try out the [unfinished] sequel! It's free too! Size: 795.4kb	Sandbomber.zip Hosted by eSnips
	Offjacker - This is a practical joke program that appears to be a virus which will destroy the victim's computer. It's all a joke though. When you double-click the file (offjacker.exe), it runs and at the end there is a button with "OK", which ends the program when clicked. It's totally harmless. Use it to scare a friend for a laugh! How? That's up to you. Rename the file if you like. The image on the left shows the main screen, where the buttons don't work (LOL). Next comes the Fatal System Error Screen that requires clicking "OK" to close. It's a riot just for seeing Motherf***er on a dialog window. Dialog windows built with Microsoft Visual C++ Compiler, program built with Game Maker 5. Finished circa 2003-4. Size: 754.6kb	offjacker.zip Hosted by eSnips
	NWP Random Number Generator - It will generate a random number in the range you specify from 1-??? I still don't know what the maximum range is, but I do know that it's between 2 and 3 billion. [Feel free to look for the magical mathematical limit for me, just let me know what you find, eh? It's probably a really oddball number...or perhaps a prime number or prime multiple.] All kinds of uses. I originally made it to help pick radio contest winners from a list of callers when I was in the radio business. Made circa late 2003. Use it to pick lottery numbers or perhaps something like a random hexadecimal color code (just set the range to 999999). Size: 699kb	Random Number Gene... Hosted by eSnips
	NWP Random Number Generator Lite - The same program as the regular version, without a couple of the 3D graphics. I made this one so that the program could be moved around via floppy discs...it's about 1.3 MB. (The EXE file that is.) Made circa late 2003. Size: 669.3kb	Random Number Gene... Hosted by eSnips

     The first video game I actually programmed was with a Commodore 64 sometime between 1989 and 1991. It was actually a game that thousands of kids programmed, because it was just a VERY simple list of commands that appeared in the back of some science magazine, can't remember now, but it was a kid's mag. (My brother, Brian, demonstrated it to me.) The "game" was called "ZAP!" or something like that. It was barely a game and more of a graphic novelty, involving the word "ZAP!" appearing when certain conditions arose or sequence of keys was pressed. It was many years after that before I ever thought about game programming again. 

     I didn't get my first personal computer until 1999, but literally submerged myself in it. At the time, there was such a thing as free [56K] internet through Juno, who actually had a local number for dial-up. [NetZero came out shortly after, but the dial-up number was not local.] My brother, who supplied me with the computer, gave me some software, including an HTML editor. I studied the help file and within 6 months, I had learned enough HTML to build my own website (for a band I was in at the time). The next year, I built one that is still up and running, for a local bar. (I was unemployed for much of that time and spent a great deal of time mastering HTML.) The whole web-design aspect of things is a big story too that is explained on another page, but suffice it to say that learning and understanding that simple programming language made me realize that I could develop game-programming skills the same way if there was a dialog-driven editor for doing so, and it turns out there were a few out there at the time. 

     The first serious game I developed was based on the movie Jaws and was called "Quint's Revenge". It took me all of a year to finish. Unfortunately, It was lost in a hard drive crash in 2001. Basically you controlled the "Orca" boat and it fired weapons that upgraded every level from grenades to missiles. Finally when you got the harpoon gun, you would chum the water and wait for the shark. If you were in water of the right depth, and had a chum line the proper length, the shark would show up and it would go to a 1st person mode where you aim a targeting reticule at the shark and try to harpoon it. If you hit the shark it went to animation of a barrel dropping from the ship and you had to follow it to get to the harpooning sequence again. After you got 3 harpoons/barrels on the shark, it went to the final scene where you had to hit the quickly moving shark with a giant missile before your boat sank. The whole game used lots of cool graphics I animated frame-by-frame that I spent solid weeks creating. There were lots of short audio clips of Quint from the movie too. I was devastated by the loss of that accomplishment. There are a few people who got to play the game a few times though before it was lost to oblivion. 

     Interestingly, Majesco games came out with a game for mobile phones last year, the mobile version of their console hit, Jaws Unleashed. In the console version, you are the shark and you destroy all things human. The mobile version is markedly different. You pilot a boat searching for the shark and upgrading equipment. Eventually, you get to a 1st person view underwater in a shark cage. You then use a targeting reticule to harpoon a shark. It was very much like my game, Quint's Revenge. What is really the irony is that once Quint's Revenge was finished, I began work on a 3D version of a sequel, where you would be the shark. Keep in mind this was in 2001! Jaws Unleashed was not released until 2006! I did post info about my games and gameplay screenshots on a website at the time, so it may have leaked to the industry that way, but I would guess that it's a concept whose time had come. Add to that the fact that my game was certainly inspired by the NES game Jaws from the mid-80's, so I really had nothing to complain about.

     After the big crash, I decided on a better game editor called Game Maker and an associated programming language called GML [Game Maker Language] developed by Mark Overmars. GML is very much like Javascript and so helped me in turn to learn some tricks with JavaScript for web design, so you can see how these two "hobbies" have been somewhat symbiotic. (BTW, you don't have to know any programming to use Game Maker, but more complex effects do require some scripting.) The first game I completed with Game Maker was Sandbomber. 

     Sandbomber did not take very long as it was basically a copy and paste rip-off job of a 1942-type vertically scrolling shooter, that I just replaced all the graphics for with different ones, along with a MIDI file of the Knight Rider theme that loops for a soundtrack. I did change several things in the program structure, like the weapon upgrades and enemies that go from left to right and projectile trajectories. When you get a score of 2000, your weapon upgrades to a 5 missile per shot weapon. It's pretty cool for as lame as it is. The rest of my games however are made all by me and are not rip-offs...not intentionally anyway! Making the game like that instead of a space shooter or something certainly had something to do with my reaction to the 9-11-2001 attacks.

     My first big breakthrough came after my frustration at not being able to find a good free online version of the card game Blackjack. There were plenty of Solitaire games for windows and Hearts and other stuff. I understood the game Blackjack or 21 quite well and I thought I could generate it with the knowledge I had gained up to that point, so I went for it. All the sounds were found online for free at various sites like: sounddogs.com. [That place is loaded with all kinds of sound effects. I used that site a lot when making commercials for my days in the radio business.] The only part of the graphics I didn't generate myself were the actual faces of the playing cards. They were part of a free graphics download. The real guts of the game is the complex mathematics with calculating the totals for a hand and computing the most beneficial value for ace cards on a given hand, especially for the dealer, who plays by a strict set of rules: don't stay until your hand is at least 17. Dealer wins a draw too. 

     After completion of Nurm's Blackjack, I started noticing glitches in the programming. Sometimes the optimal value of the dealer's aces were not being properly computed. About 2 years after the game was finished I discovered ways to cheat with another glitch I left in the programming: If you win a round, you can get your winnings for that round repeatedly by continuing to click "Stay" before the next round begins. It only works when the dealer doesn't bust AND you beat the dealer's hand. [It has to say: "You Win!"] 

     The coolest part of Nurm's Blackjack for me was the Bonus Round, which starts after every 20th hand of Blackjack. It's a 4-reel slot machine with just 4 different images on the reel, and one of them was "Wild", which required some extra scripting. The reels don't really spin though. They just are animations made out of 4 images. They all run through the same pattern until they stop, where they land on an image selected at random. You get 30 free spins with a chance at greatly increasing your money, then it goes back to Blackjack. That was the basis for my final triumph: a fully working, bug-free game that was actually fun..."Nurm's Cherry Mastur Beta version". [Of course, that's debatable.] 

     I spent an entire year writing the code for those 9 reels. Having the game's scripts compute the values of the reels was a daunting programming task. There are 8 paylines. Every possible combination of results on the reels had to be accounted for in the programmed scripts so that when they actually did result, the game knew what value to place on the result. I was patient and completed the project in almost exactly a year (Spring 2002-Spring-2003). If you run out of money, the game laughs at you and asks if you want to play again. The graphics on the reels were an interesting development. I tracked down True Type Fonts that had images of fruit; I loaded those into a 3D Text program and rendered and colored them in 3D. Once again, they don't spin, they just quickly change from one image to the next. At the time, I couldn't comprehend using code to produce animations, rather than relying on animated graphics. 

     My next project was an update on Cherry Mastur, called Mastur Bettor. It never got properly started though. It was to have true spinning reels and more images on the reel and more sensible bet and win values. (At the time I really wanted to make a Cherry Master clone, but just didn't understand the real game well enough to try to recreate it.) Probably would have taken nearly another year to complete, but that's when my short radio career began and I stopped having time for anything except radio. 

     The last interactive program (before 2007) I made was a random number generator with a user-selectable range. I made it because every morning, the guy doing the morning show on the station next door did a contest and always wanted me to pick a random number between 1 and 12...or 1 and 17...or 1 and 26...or however many people had called in for the free birthday cake. The first version was cool and slick and functional but was just slightly too big to fit on a floppy disk, so I removed the flashy NWP graphic and had a "Lite" version for distribution via floppy. [BTW, the highest number it will accept as the range ceiling is still a bit of a mystery, but I know it's higher than 2,000,000,000 and lower than 3,000,000,000.]

     I did really start to make some big advancements in my self-training: I got books and software on Java 2, Direct X 7.0 for isometric game programming, and finally Visual C++. I constructed my first 3D matrix with an incredibly easy to learn language called DarkBASIC.

I'd like to throw out a shout of thanks to my brother, Brian Robinson, for hooking me up a killer computer...twice!
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