Captain Yates: The Freedom Quest!

Captain Yates: The Freedom Quest!

Our first game we decided to write was called Captain Yates: The Freedom Quest!. It was going to be a cross between Lode Runner 2 and Commander Keen. The goal was for a game that was easy to play with classic elements from older games.

Apart from collecting all the power cores to exit the puzzle, the game had no real purpose. The plan was to add that later on. This perhaps wasn't the best approach to game making...

Yates was written in VB and used the now-dead Truevision3D engine. This was the first major project to use the .NET version of Visual Basic (we were VB6 guys). Due to life getting in the way, we kind of just stopped on working on it. A couple of years later, I started work on Mad Monks' Revenge, with my brother joining soon after.

The editor was fully featured and allowed you to combine and shuffle the order of puzzles (which we could have sworn MMR did), add paths for the enemy to follow, and test the game within the editor.

The last Truevision3D based-copy of the game had a nice event-driven user interface controls. When the user interface controls for MMR needed replacing, we immediately thought of saving time and using the Yates copy, but, the code appears to be missing.

Collecting power cores

Early days

The latest version was done by Gareth in Unity. This version was more of a proof of concept. The main feature was that it did not restrict you to an isometic view - it allowed you to freely rotate the camera (ala Ilo Milo).

Yates with Unity

It would be nice to get back to it one day. By "get back to it", I mean start from scratch with FNA (the same as MMR) and C#. We'd also plan more of the game planned out earlier on.