While working on our more ambitious projects, we created also a couple of smaller and experimental games. They did not age as well, and we mention them mainly to nurture the nostalgia.
Pakman 95
One of the Czech gaming legends was Pampuch, a Pacman clone for Windows made by Zoner software. Even Ondra’s parents - who normally don’t play games - used to play it every day for a couple of months. Eventually, they learned to beat all the levels and did not enjoy the game as much.
Ondra, being the nice person he is, created for them a clone of the clone. It had new levels and a slightly different behavior of the enemies. And it came with an editor so new levels could be created as soon as the players learned the old ones.
It’s not clear whether Ondra’s parents played this new game as much, but at least they acknowledged that all the money spent on programming books were not wasted.
VlakMan
Ondra built one more version of the game as a term programming project. While the previous one was written in C++, this one had to be written in Delphi. And as another innovation, it added a train going around the level on rails. But it was a term project much more than a game and the result was not very enjoyable.
Evil blocks game
Another gaming legend and another adaptation. When playing a Tetris-like game, you might feel like the game always sends you the worst possible piece - and you’d be wrong. In our adaptation, this is actually true - it uses the minimax algorithm to determine which piece will cause you the most trouble, and it will send exactly that one.