Chip's Challenge III

Background

Chip's Challenge III is an OpenGL recreation of the first three levels from the 1991 Microsoft Game: Chip's Challenge. The game was ported to Windows from the original Chip's Challengemade by EPYX for the Atari Lynx. Using texture mapping, alpha texture blending, texture animation, and custom data structures, this game was created in C++ using the Eigen, GLFW, and GLEW libraries with assistance from Photoshop to crop out textures.

The original game features Nerdy Chip McCallahan who is tasked with navigating through Medinda's Clubhouse of puzzles to be allowed into the Bit Buster Club. My version recreates the first three levels using textures taken directly from the original game – for educational purposes only.

Demo Video

Level Creation

With more time I would have liked to reverse engineer the original LEVELS.DAT file that came with the 1991 program files, but since I only had enough time to figure out the logic for the first three level tile assortment, I decided to simplify the task by using two text files. The files have the suffix .0 and .1 to act as layers: Layer 0 for all permanent floor tiles and Layer 1 for all the other types of tiles. The prefix is simply the level number. The other reason for this was my original idea to expand the game beyond "classic mode" and include a map editor as well as custom map loader.

Tile Textures and Sprites

Every tile texture was taken from screenshots of the original game being run in a 32-bit Windows XP Virtual Machine. The tiles with alpha blending were retouched and saved as PNG files with alpha enabled.

Rendering

When a level file is read from disk, it is then split into four layers: the floor, Chip and all of the objects, creatures, and finally walls and locks. These layers are drawn that very order, allowing the transparent textures to be rendered without a depth test. To remove the graphical glitches, I had to move all of the cube objects to be rendered after the transparent creature layer otherwise the result is a texture overlap and certain cube faces clipping through others:

HUD

The HUD was photoshopped from a screenshot of the original game with an extra bar added to the top, the game window removed and turned into a transparent square, and the number boxes blacked out. This texture is displayed on a stretched square tile with alpha blending directly in front of the static camera. As seen at the end of the game-play video, when the scene is clicked, the mouse can move the camera view. The inventory and numbers are drawn slightly above the HUD overlay in the direction of the camera such that the number textures exist on top of the overlay.

Movement

To navigate in the game, the keys WASD are used for movement and spacebar to reset the level.

Texture Animation

As seen at the end of the game demo, when the game is finished, Chip cheers for joy. This texture "animation" is accomplished using the glfwGetTime function to know when to switch textures. This style of animation can be done with several sprites to accomplish early style gaming graphics without manually placing and rendering every pixel in code.

Particles

The GIF above shows the particle step function running at a slower rate to make it easier to see the particle movement. The particles were meant to look like a blue fireworks display celebrating the victory.