Rudy Rucker's
Software Engineering and Computer Games
Hall of Fame

This page lists some of the game projects that students have done in Rudy Rucker's classes at SJSU using Rucker's Pop framework software for his Software Engineering and Computer Games (Addison-Wesley, 2002).

For each listed game, this page shows a screen shot, and provides a link for downloading a zip file containing the executable and a help file. All the executables are Windows programs.

The executables are provided (a) because many of them are fun to play with, (b) to give the students some exposure, and (c) as examples of things that can be done with the Pop framework. Do keep in mind that these are student projects carried out during a limited amount of time; some of the games still have bugs or performance issues. But all have been virus-scanned and found clean.

The games are provided in an "as-is" condition as shareware to be used for educational purposes. No product support whatsoever is guaranteed. Further questions regarding source code or reuse rights should be addressed to the individual student programmers.

Names and email addresses of the individual student programmers can be found in the About boxes of the executables, and/or in the accompanying Help files. In addition, we list the students' names with their programs.

NOTE: The built-in Windows XP unzip utility has a bug/feature which may prevent it from unzipping my zip files, which are made using WinZip. If you are running Windows XP, after you download the *.zip file, the XP unzipper may tell you that there are no files in the *.zip file. It's mistaken! In this case, you'll need to get hold of WinZip or some other non-buggy unzip utility.

Spring, 2003

This term all of our games were 3D. Most teams started using character sprintes based on Quake"MD2" files, which store a mesh and a bitmap skin.

Wacky Golf. A 3D-view miniature golf game with some amusingly odd holes. Includes a 3D-modeled moving windmill! Fun game.

Stephen Mills, Thomas Yang, Wesley Yue

Arctic Bound. An ambitious strategy game in which you control a flock of penguins fighting against aliens for fish and holes in the ice. Multiple views and includes a level editor. 2.5 dimensional view. I still can't play it very well, but Star Craft players may do better.

Alvin Cho, Thomas Mensch, Silvia Palara

Code Bandit. A strong first-person-shooter in a 3D-maze. You pick up goodies and blaze away at enemies. This team got an A* maze-search algorithm working so that the enemies are good at finding you.

Karl Schramm, Doug Simmons, Michael Wu

Chef Fighter. This is a game in the Tetris/Puzzle Fighter family. Beautiful 3D graphics. Controls don't feel crisp enough, but it's a nice fresh game.

Tuong Lien, Enrique Tang, Mike Tsai

Spot Come Home. A dog (well, actually the team couldn't find a dog MD2 file and used a green alien) in a 3D maze avoiding enemies, picking up food, and barking away enemies. Nice bright graphic design.

Christine Ghang, Catherine Pham, Thien Tran

Flag Bearer. Another shoot-fest in a maze. Here the goal is to touch all four flags and make them be your color before the opponents touch them and turn them back. Opponents aren't much competition. Some nice graphic wall textures, and a waving texture for the flag.

Po-Chih Chen, Matthew Heard, Elisa Sarino, Aasif Shabbir

Cat Ball. A cross between volleyball and tennis. Our first 3D game of this nature. A good first step, but playability could be improved.

Monte Jeu, Yong Lim, Charly Lin

Tornoi du Comique. Critters in a series of 3D mazes with enemies and goodies. Reasonably playable.

Sandeep Dhaliwal, Benjamin Dinh, Doug Uno, Victoria Vallstrom

JumpSport. A side-scroller with moving platforms that your player hops onto. Nicely executed. Beautiful background bitmaps made with Kai PowerTools, and really cute bitmaps for the player sprite.

Needs a recent or upgraded version of Windows with oleacc.dll to run.

Jim Cheung, Nithin Reddy, Joko Sutomo

Kill Time. A simple level-based 2D game with lots and lots of enemies chasing you. Tweaked for good playability.

Doug Uno, Kenny Moy, Haitham Halloum

3D Bug Shooter. Based on 3D Defender, but you aren't riding the player. You use a crossbow to pop bubbles which contain bugs (bad) or butterflies (good). These flap over to a row of trees behind you, either eating the tree or producing fruit. Each critter has a "brother" critter that acts as its shadow; the shadow critter copies its brother's (x,y,z) position, but sets y (which is "up" in this world) to the low value of the border box.

Kwok Wing Tang, Minh Dang, Thuy Nguyen

Smart Cat. A maze-style game with dogs chasing the player cat which chases mice. Nice action.

Darrian Hale, David Wong, Ken Pao

PopRallyRacer. A car race game using the waypoint technique to enable the rival cars follow the track. The player is kept on track by walls without having to use the sniff method. Two player mode is implemented with letter key controls for one player, arrow key controls for the other.

Kenji Tan, Bao Mai, Rui Chen, Dung Luc

3D Ratrace. Based on the GameStub with a cGraphicsOpenGL view to give a 3D effect. A maze-style game. The player has a nice-looking rat-like cSpriteComposite icon made up of circles and triangles. There are enemy birds that have their _spriteattitude set with a z-axis component that makes them appear to float above the board (even though their collisions are still computed as if they were down on the board with the other critters). The enemy birds have composite sprites consisting of a body and two wings, with the notable feature that the animate method adjusts the wing _spriteattitude matrices so as to make the wings flap.

Needs a recent or upgraded version of Windows with oleacc.dll to run.

Chiao-Kai Yang, Raymond Chan, Doug Simmons

AntiVirus. A well-crafted maze game where you try and kill off enemy critters on a series of levels. Interest is added by the fact that you have different colored power-levels, selectable by an extra toolbar.

Randolph Schmidt, Jose Rivera, Bharat Joshi

Bermuda Triangle. A basic GameStub-type game with shooting enemies, power packs, and walls. World is larger than the visible screen and is themed with marine bitmaps.

Andy Wu, Sam Wu, Anthony Tu, Nhut Hyunh

GoFishing. An original game idea. You move the player back and forth along the top edge of the screen, and use the Up/Down keys to lower and raise a fishing line. In the "water" that fills most of the screen are fish and crabs. If a crab touches your line you lose a health point. If the hook at the end of your line touches a fish, you catch the fish and get a score point. Program has a bug that occasionally sets the crabs to multiplying uncontrollably.

Isabel Zhang, Karen Chow, Yisi Lau

Ghostcastle. An excellent copy of the classic came Star Castle. You shoot at a central mother ship that's surrounded by three rings of walls. Each of the wall-rings is an octagon made up of eight cCritterWall objects. The walls are kept rotating by a cForceVortex.

Don Bernal, Wallun Chan, Frank Chang

TequilaWorm. A maze game inspired by Slithereens. Your player moves about in a maze trying to eat (from the tail-end first) some enemy worms. The worms are constructed as the Pop program Worm game, as critters linked together by rod and spring forces. A good job.

Lee Gong, Rich Prillinger, Joseph Cheng

3D Blaster. An enhancement of the Defender3D game. You fly your player forward for quite a long time, with waves of different kinds of enemies coming at you. The game is a first-person-shooter whose world is one long hallway.. Slightly rough in appearance, but runs at a good speed. An effective 3D experience.

Chi Chan, Wyley Dai, Madhuri Potu

3D Jewel Hunter. An OpenGL view of a two-dimensional maze game, with three-dimensional creatures in it. The power-packs are spheres and, which is what makes this project impressive, the enemy critters are animated 3D mesh-shapes covered with graphical texture "skins." The shapes and skins are read in from standard Quake MD2 files. As of May, 2003, have integrated this code into the cSpriteQuake class for all builds later than Pop29.

Giavinh Pham, Charlie Tran, Thuy Bui

Footsball. A nice game modeled on the physical Foosball game. This is a game with sliding rods and plastic soccermen mounted on them. The player spins the rods, trying to make his soccermen kick a ball into a goal.

Jimmy Huang, Tony Xu, Duy Nguyen

Lost Crown. A side scroller oard game in which player collects treasure and avoids monsters.

Lee Lacanlale, Andrew Nguyen, Kiminori Inagaki

Climber. Player is climbing up an office building. The windows keep opening with critters throwing objects out. Player must avoid the open windows and the falling debris, which included typewriters and pianos! This is nice. It's really a kind of vertically oriented side-scroller.

Michael Moore, David Dong, Karno Halim, Martina Mesic

Four Pieces of Fate. An Egyptian-themed game with four levels. On each level the player picks up a key, avoiding enemies and moving among walls.

Sudhir Srikanth, Thu Nguyen, Jason Ngai

Pinball. A pinball game with several levels. These students got the physics of the flippers to work correctly, which was a nontrivial task. The game still doesn't quite nail the problem of making a really good pinball game.

Hung Dinh, Nam Lam, Thanh Phan

Soccer. Two five-man soccer teams fight it out. The user's control shifts to whichever of the onscreen players is closest to the ball, which is an interesting solution to the problem of how to control a team of players - shift the listener to whoever has the ball! User has the option to dribble the ball along or to kick it.

Gary Chin, Chi Chan, Uri Rayzberg

The Last Robonator. An impressive game with scads of animated icons. Little robots attack relentlessly as the player moves from board to board, using arrow keys to move and mouse click to shoot. Inspired by Robotropolis.

Jeremy Dittrich, Gerry Girard, Nisha Ahluwalia

Amazing Mouse. A game like Pac-Man, with the player as a mouse eating pieces of cheese, and the enemies as cats. Each piece of cheese (or food-pellet) was a critter, the speed was kept high by not checking collisions for the cheese critters.

Harry Fu, Kerry Goodman, Rosanna Tse

Deer's Revenge. The player is an armed deer critter shooting at hunters. The world is larger than a single screen, and the background scrolls to keep the player in the center. Icons are animated, and they change appearance to match the motion direction of their critters. Both of these features were big achievements at the time, as player-tracking and animated icons weren't yet built into the Pop Framework.

Bobby Tse, Douglas Andersen, Sarah Levantine

Labyrinth Roller. Interesting game modeled on the wooden Labyrinth game in which the player tilts the board this way and that to lead a heavy ball through a partially walled maze without falling into pitfall holes.

Craig Clark, Cherry Yang, Jason Peng

Pixie Quest. A three-level game based, like many other projects, on the Pop Framework Spacewar game. Beautiful background bitmaps make this game a stand-out, and rather than shooting bullets, the player is spreading pixie dust to neutralize opponents like wasps and bees.

Karissa Huang, Karen-Hoa Do, Kendra Ladeau

Brick Bugs. Player pounds a way out of an encircling wall of bricks, while little brick bugs shoot things. Numerous kinds of brick bugs; meaner ones are attracted by the "noise" of the player pounding away bricks (which disappear after a few hits as in the arcade game Break-Out). An original idea.

Paul Sumares, Jake Woodhams, Puneet Dhaliwal

Garden. Player feeds plants with water and tries to protect them with poison spray from attacking bugs. Water and poison sources are on ladders on either side of the screen. This was one of the first projects to use animated sprites for the critters.

Vladi Sankin, Pasha Sadri, Vu Hwang

Grammar. Player picks a floating disk with the correct word to complete a sample sentence. An effective educational game based on PickNPop.

Sue Wilner, Theresa Nguyen, Jean Schundler

Shepherd Boy. Player herds sheep around, who are repelled by him, tries to herd them into a pen. Wolves come to eat the sheep, player can throw rocks at them. Good physics and playability in this one.

Kelvin Shum, Ken Shitamoto, Tam Minh