Cruncher

Help Cruncher escape the clutches of the evil, or at least not very friendly, cloblins. Cruncher's only hope for escape is to collect all of the magical diamonds while avoiding his dangerous foes. Certain powerful diamonds will allow Cruncher to fight back, but the effects do not last long. Those cloblins are craftier than they look, so grab those special diamonds before they do...

In early 2006, I decided to learn the BlitzMax programming language. I chose BlitzMax because it is a cross-platform programming environment geared specifically toward gaming. I wanted to go cross-platform because I wanted to develop little games for both Mac and Windows, so this offered a no-hassle way of doing this.

Cruncher was my first dive into this language, and I am reasonably happy with it. As I really enjoy Ms. Pac-Man, and it is a relatively simple game to program in most languages, I figured a tribute to it would be a good test.

One nice feature of this game is that it is designed to use the same keyboard controls as MAME, and even includes the ability to accept coin inputs, which makes it an easy addition to home brewed arcade cabinets.

Unfortunately, I made this back when PowerPC Macs were the thing, so it doesn't run on modern Macs that don't have Rosetta. Maybe sometime I'll get around to recompiling it for Intel Macs.