Tuesday 18 January 2011

Reverse Engineering the Abandonware Game "Ignition"

Ignition has always been one of my favourite racing games. It had a quirky charm that was reminiscent of Micro Machines, but set in beautiful outdoor environments.

It's now one of the most prominent cases of Abandonware ever. First published by Virgin Interactive, which was acquired by Titus Software, which then became Avalon Interactive. Both Titus and Avalon no longer exist. So who owns the rights to the game (and more importantly who has the source code) is a mystery.

The other day I decided to take a look at the files that come with Ignition, I wondered if there was anything salvageable for an indie game developer. Perhaps I could knock together a level viewer or mod the game. The first thing I noticed is that Ignition uses a lot of different file formats.

Tuesday 11 January 2011

PPA For My Game Developer Kit

So, I've spent the last few months focusing on developing cross-platform games. I've started small with Ubuntu Bug Blast, and gradually I'm going to build to more and more complex games. The idea is that I will identify bottlenecks in development, and create small modular libraries to cover the repetitive parts of developing a game in OpenGL.