[OT] Spacehacker

Um, wow, no. In the years since I made Spacehacker, you are the FIRST to express any interest in it whatsoever. :)

I downloaded a bunch of your old free games the other week.

I thought Spacehacker was an interesting concept, but I can't figure out the coding. Nor am I actually clear what the goal is, other than to hijack the enemy ships AI.

The goal in the game is to destroy the robot mothership. You do this simply by moving your ship directly over the mothership and waiting for the timer to count down. Of course, the defense ships will destroy you first, so you have to find a way to reprogram the individual alien ships so they let you sit on the mothership.

I was actually inspired by Hellgate: London. Not by the game itself, but by the loading screens, which featured amazing "magic runes". I immediately thought, "wouldn't it be cool if those runes meant something? Wouldn't it be cool if the secret magic runes were actually programming code?"

I actually then found a couple of fantasy novels about "magic=programming", and they were okay. I wanted to experiment with the concept of programming as a game, and (of course) I had 2D spaceships lying around, so Spacehacker was born. The language itself is a very simple assembly-like language, with "opcode" instructions that take 1,2, or 3 arguments, and a very "Go-to" structure (no explicit functions).

After I built Spacehacker, everyone I showed it to bounced off. The real programmers said, "I see what to do, but it doesn't look any fun." Everyone else said, "What do you do?!?" They all agreed that the game might work as a language tutorial, IF I radically changed the game to have a MUCH flatter learning curve. But for me it was just another experiment, so I moved on.

I assume you mean the Wiz Zumwault series (for instance).

Anyway, I reprogrammed the enemy ships so they stood still and then blew up the mothership.

Basically I just quickly zeroed out the ADDIM (whatever that is) before the remaining ships shot me, and that stopped them dead in the water.

I tried to figure out the language, and got the ships to not shoot, to zoom backwards (and forwards) forever, and to go in circles.

I was trying to figure out how to program the enemy ships to attack the mining ships (or each other) instead, but no luck.

And I couldn't get the mothership to do anything when I tried to code it with a simple program.


It reminded me a bit of core wars.

Now imagine if the Artemis Science officer could hack into an enemy ship (or competing bridge) and reprogram their system.

Just kidding. :)


(Do you have the opcode guide lying around anywhere? I'm not going to spend time learning the language, but I am curious about the structure of each command.)